Skeletons In the Closet
by Zero's Wings
Summary: Read my other fics first, starting with the Awakening. This one is the main story, an epic adventure/drama, and the pilot's pasts are the keys to a grand sceme for control of all of humanity. To say any more would ruin the story. Pairings: 1xR and 3x4.
1. Typical Morning-or-Opium Oil Paintings

Author's Note: This is the major arc of my fics about the pilots' pasts. The first part is a little on the slow and sappy side, especially for me, but don't worry, the good stuff is coming. Oh yeah, there's also a little bit of a lime in this one. 

~ Skeletons in the Closet ~

Part1

By Zero's Wings

Typical Morning

-or-

Opium Oil Paintings

Relena sat up in her bed, unable to sleep. Her skin was still shining with sweat. Her breaths were shallow and abrupt. Her sheets were suddenly hot and uncomfortable. She twisted her legs around, letting her small feet dangle out below the blanket. Heero stirred next to her, awoken by her restlessness.

"What is it?" he asked groggily.

"Oh, nothing," she replied. "It's just…do you ever have one of those terrifying moments of self-awareness? One of those moments where you wake up, and you realize that you're looking through a pair of eyes from some dark void inside a skull, and you are existing as that person. You are living their life and affecting people all around you."

Relena paused, catching her breath. Thinking back, it had been a wonderful night. Dinner at an expensive restaurant, champagne back at his apartment, and then right into the bedroom. _We couldn't keep our hands off each other, she recalled, blushing slightly. __So why do all these morbid thoughts come to me now? She sighed, and then decided to continue._

"But then the scary question comes. How do you know it's all real? How do you know that when that body dies, you won't just be sucked back into that void forever? And most of all, how do you know that you're even affecting anything, or anyone? The people around you might not even be real, just figments of your imagination. Or you're caught in someone else's dream, and you don't even know if you're real. I mean, how do I know that I'm real, that this bed is real, that…" she turned to Heero, her eyes a glistening sapphire, "…how do I know…that you're real?"

A thin smile passed over Heero's face.

"I'll show you."

*****

The sun rose up, covering the earth in its bright morning glow. The Sanc Kingdom emerged from the darkness of the night, alive once more with its dew soaked fields and rolling hills and dipping valleys. Birds sung and clouds formed light and puffy in the sky. It was a perfect day.

Heero's eyes opened slowly, his vision returned in a haze. He rolled over and drew the linen covers away from his half-naked body. Morning had come sooner than he had expected. He felt sad in a way, that glorious night had passed by so rapidly. It was almost like a blur in his mind. But then all the events became fresh in his mind again when he saw Relena lying in bed next to him, all the covers pushed away from her slender, nude body. She sighed gently, and then leaned in and kissed his cheek.

"What time is it?" Heero asked, now fully awake. Relena looked at the alarm clock on her night stand. Her sleepy eyes widened and she suddenly became alert. The clock's green digital letters said 6:30. 

"Oh my god!" she cried. "I'm going to be late for my meeting!" Relena slid out of bed and opened her closet door. Heero eyes traced up her back, absorbing every contour in her soft, powder-like skin as she slipped on a bathrobe.

"Forget that," he said in a wavering, somnolent voice. "Come back to bed."

"You know I can't," Relena chided him. "Why don't you get in the shower after me and come along? I'm sure the preventers would be happy to have your input." Heero grumbled and got out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and ambled into the bathroom after her.

While Relena showered, Heero shaved his face, wiping it clean of what had been the beginnings of a beard. He had not been able to shake that night where he revealed his past from his mind. All of those events, his awakening, his retribution, they seemed so close, almost tangible. He told Relena all of this as he shaved; figuring it was as good a time as any. _But why now? he thought. __Why am I sharing all of these morbid thoughts and memories with her now? She watched him the entire time through the foggy glass of the shower door. When Heero came to the part where he killed Emulat, he flinched and cut himself with his razor. He had never done that before. Annoyed, he wiped away the small drop or two of blood and continued. _

When Heero finished his story, Relena turned off the shower faucet. She rushed out of the shower and, without so much as reaching for a towel, embraced Heero and kissed him forcefully. Having her wet, naked body pressed up against him felt so good.

"We've been under a lot of stress this past week," she said in a velvet-soft voice. "Duo getting shot at Howard's place, all of the new stuff going on at work…it's amazing that we've all survived unharmed."

"Duo was lucky that time. If his injury had been serious, there would've been no one to help him. We were out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It doesn't get any more isolated than those islands. That was their original appeal as a meeting place."

"We always seem to be getting lucky breaks," Relena said somberly. "Are you ever afraid that our luck will run out?"

Heero smiled and took her soft, delicate face up in his hands.

"I'll be all right as long as I'm with you," Heero said with an unfamiliar tenderness. _Where did that come from? he wondered. __Maybe I really am going soft. Relena smiled and her eyes watered a bit. She closed them briefly, and when she opened them back up, she was normal again. Heero saw a different person in those eyes, not his lover, but the girl he had learned to care about over the past few years. They pulled away from each other. Heero turned away from her, suddenly uncomfortable to be looking at her naked body. Neither laid eyes on the other again until they were both fully dressed._

Heero walked into the small kitchen/living room that composed the rest of his apartment. There were no windows at all; he didn't trust them. He used the blank wall space as an excuse to start an art collection. Heero hung his favorite painting next to the refrigerator. It was a collection of Greco-Roman figures jamming sharpened sticks into big fish. The visages of Abraham Lincoln and James Dean were blended in with the painting's abundant flares of black and orange. It was called _Tuna Fishing. It was a Salvador Dali original, probably worth a fortune. Zechs gave it to him when he first moved in. Zechs called it a 'settling down' present. Heero still wasn't sure what to make of the macabre painting, but it had grown on him._

"When are you going to take that thing down?" Relena asked, regarding the painting with disgust.

"It was a present from _your brother," he retorted._

"It's grotesque," she said, wrinkling her short, little nose. "I don't know what my brother was thinking giving it to you."

"I like it," Heero said with a little smile. He pulled a carton of milk out of the fridge and drank from it. Relena looked at him disapprovingly.

"We really have to get going," she said tersely. Heero put down the now empty carton and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

"Breakfast?"

"I'll pick something up on the way. Get my purse, will you?"

*****

Heero found the preventers meeting to be rather boring and uneventful. There was another crisis involving the instability of Mars for terraforming. Zechs and Noin had returned to Sanc after witnessing the first in a series of intense Martian storms. However, as long as the storms were raging, no one could communicate with the Mars team, and no one could go to or leave the planet. It was just wait-and-see; everyone was pretty much stuck where they were.

More interesting to Heero was the speech that Relena gave to a group of delegates from the various European nations. She addressed hundreds of people from a small podium with a white spotlight bearing down on her. Relena put forceful emotion into every word that left her mouth. There was fire in her words and in her eyes, Heero could see it even from his lofty balcony seat. He found that aggressive power very attractive. He was sure that it was what had attracted him to Relena in the first place.

Heero was waiting for Relena off-stage. She grinned at him, then went back around the curtain to greet the press. Heero saw real strength in her now; she could do things that he couldn't even imagine. _I'm just a killer who was in the right place at the right time. She's the one who changed history. The fighting is over. I'm powerless now, but she'll continue to have an impact on the times. Heero felt genuinely lucky that Relena had stayed with him. He couldn't possibly imagine why she did so. __I'm an antique. There's no use for me. I have no power over anything except my own life. __Maybe she pities me._

Relena walked back behind the curtain. She looked tired. Heero put his arm around her.

"No matter how hard you try, you just can't get some people to accept peace," she said, sighing worriedly.

"Yes, I'm one of them. You're talking about the uprising in Croatia, though, right?" As he spoke, Relena looked up at him with a puzzled expression.

"What do you mean, you're one of them? Aren't you happy that we've finally achieved a state of universal tranquillity? All of mankind has decided to do away with weapons and come to an understanding, as one race, one nation."

"I heard your speech," he said, sounding ruder than he had meant to. "I just know that something is going to happen, and I'll make sure I'm ready for when it does."

"Have a little more faith in people," Relena said, giving him a cute little smile.

"Sorry. All my faith is in you." He was trying out a little romantic talk. As Duo said, sweet talk makes the difference between a quickie and an all-nighter. Heero wasn't so concerned with that, but he wanted to make himself a bit more appealing to Relena. He had settled down, the wars were over, and they were never coming back. Now, he could start to create some semblance of a normal life for himself, and some semblance of a human soul.

Relena was paged by Sally and told she had a bunch of press conferences set up for later this afternoon. They parted ways in that cramped backstage area. Relena blew him a kiss goodbye, and was then inundated by another hoard of reporters.

Heero walked to his apartment in a light drizzle of rain. He unlocked the large door with the number 88 tacked on it with big, shiny letters. He tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter beside him. As he approached the fridge to find himself a drink, Heero noticed that his vidphone was flashing its 'incoming call' light. He turned the screen off and picked up the phone.

"Hello, Heero Yuy. That is what you're still calling yourself, isn't it?"

"Who is this?" Heero asked in a volatile tone, reaching for the power switch.

"You know," the voice hissed. At that instant, Heero dropped the phone as though it had reached out and bitten him.

End part1

Author's Note: So what did you think? Love it? Hate it? I want to know!! How did it stack up to my other fics? What would you like to see happen? Email me please! I'm at js0502@exis.net Thanks a lot to all those who have given me support! ^_~ 


	2. The First Call

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. There's some mild sexual content and strong language in this part, but nothing too shocking. Oh yeah, if you haven't read at least my fic entitled 'The Awakening,' you should read that first, Otherwise, you won't get this one.  
  
   
  
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~  
  
Part 2  
  
By Zero's Wings  
  
The First Call  
  
Heero cradled the phone in his shaking hands.  
  
"Y…you did not…you didn't answer my question." Heero stammered. What's wrong? he thought nervously. His speech had always been impeccable. Then, it came to him in an instant. It was that voice. His view of perfection had been clouded only a handful of times before, and they were all in the presence of that voice.  
  
"You're dead," Heero spat out clumsily, his mouth refusing to accept the words, refusing to accept the entire conversation.  
  
"If I were dead, would I be speaking to you now?" The voice on the other end of the line tittered with excitement; a sort of sick glee. "Of course not. Your limited, rational ways of thinking have come to the conclusion that I, Dr. Octavian Culex Emulat, would be dead in a physical sense." An invisible hand crushed Heero's windpipe. He gasped for shallow breaths. To Heero, just hearing that name again felt like having his brain sodomized with an icicle. Impossible! his mind screamed. This is a nightmare. I just, he stifled a nervous laugh, I just can't wake up from it.  
  
"Although your assumption was incorrect, it was not without rational evidence. I don't want to it explain it to you now."  
  
"What the hell do you want from me?" Heero said, his vision shuddering with blurs of color. His mind was simply unable or unwilling to receive the idea that Emulat could be alive, after all these years.  
  
"You could not possibly think you have outlived your usefulness in this life. This world still has use for you. Unfortunately for the plastic nation that you have pointlessly aligned yourself with," Emulat began in a condescending, virulent tone, "I also have a use for you."  
  
"I won't be your pawn again. You have no control over me. There's no way you can make me into a whore to your twisted ideas."  
  
"Crude language. Especially considering that your defiance and resistance are paltry emotional gestures. You have always belonged to me, and you always will." Heero could almost see Emulat's sneering grin. His hands were twitching uncontrollably. They needed triggers and syringes to wrap themselves around. "Goodbye for now, Heero."  
  
Heero stood there, clutching the phone's earpiece as if it were his only son. The horrible voice was gone. After several moments, he finally, reluctantly, hung the phone up. His breathing had returned to normal. Was that part of Emulat's control? Can he still chain my body in those awful shackles of pain? Is he still inside me? It was a nightmare.  
  
Heero slumped down in a chair and wished he hadn't just given up alcohol. That small bit of champagne from the night before was the last of the bottle, just as he had promised himself the bottle was the last of its kind to claim a place in his refrigerator. He could use alcohol's degrading effects upon the mind right now, however. He hated the perfection that he had been constantly struggling toward. He hated it because of the demon it reminded him of, and of the angel it threatened to betray.  
  
Relena unlocked the door to Heero's apartment, precariously balancing a stuffed grocery bag in one hand, while searching her purse for her key with the other.  
  
Her first reaction as she opened the door was that Heero's apartment had been robbed. She immediately dropped the bag of groceries to the floor in shock. There were clothes strewn all over the place, furniture was likewise thrown about with carelessness. It wasn't until Relena saw Heero crouching in the middle of the mess, spiky clumps of hair covering his eyes and darkening his face with knife-shaped shadows. Sweat rolled down his cheeks. He was panting like a wild dog.  
  
It took several moments for Heero to even realize that Relena was in the room. Relena knew how unusual that was for him. She had never known him to be unaware of anyone within a mile radius. He finally lifted his head, the only greeting he could manage. Relena stepped back, a hundred fearful, confused, and concerned emotional states pouring through her like sand through a sieve.  
  
Heero's eyes were not there usual state, not the endless, clear blue ocean- worlds into his soul. They were a dark, hazy swamp of confusion. There was a storm passing through his soul.  
  
Relena took another step back, afraid of what Heero was close to becoming. She loved him; but she had no misconceptions about the dangerous murderer that was buried inside him. From his current appearance, she was convinced that the grave was more shallow now than it had been since the war.  
  
"Touch me," he said pleadingly, but as the words left his mouth, they died. "I need to know that you're real." Relena was overcome with emotion. Completely forgetting doubt and fear, Relena practically flew into his arms, tears building up uncontrollably in her eyes.  
  
"What happened?" she said. To Heero, her voice was the softest, most beautiful sound to ever grace his ears.  
  
"You shouldn't have to worry. This is my problem. My fucked-up life." He looked so haunted to Relena. She had never seen him this disturbed by anyone or anything. He had always been so untouchable.  
  
"Heero, tell me. I want to help."  
  
"You can't. I can't even help myself now." He gave a small, pathetic laugh. It sounded more like a stuttering moan. "Even so, I'm glad you're here. I feel safe with you in my arms."  
  
"I'm glad I'm here too, Heero. But I can't help you unless you tell me what's wrong."  
  
"My past has caught up with me. Let's just leave it at that," Heero said, unable to think of anything but Emulat's horrible voice, a moldy ghost from his past, returned to haunt him when he was most complacent and comfortable.  
  
"More than you know." Relena smiled thinking back over the day. "Trowa and Quatre took the red-eye into Cinq last night. They surprised me after the meeting with the Earth Sphere President. I told them we'd stop by their hotel tonight and maybe go out for some dinner."  
  
"Cancel. I'm in no condition to see them."  
  
"Don't you want to see your friends, Heero?  
  
"No. Especially not them." Heero lowered his head again, resigned from the conversation. Relena sighed, frustrated. She knew that telling Heero to get over this was too harsh right now, but he was shutting her out, and only sinking deeper into this depression as a result.  
  
"Heero, please, let me love you. Let me care for you. You need me right now, just as I have needed you so many times in the past."  
  
"That is all that I want right now." Heero smiled for the first time since his conversation with Emulat. As he looked at Relena's soft face and the caring soul within, that cursed name was fading from his consciousness. She was smiling too, through the old tears.  
  
"Let's go take off our clothes," Relena whispered in his ear. She took Heero by the hand and he followed her with a spreading grin.  
  
End of part2  
  
Author's Note: So, how do you like the fic so far? How is the second part compared to the first? Tell me everything. 


	3. Nervous Break

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. Oh yeah, if you haven't read at least my fic entitled 'The Awakening,' you should read that first, Otherwise, you won't get this one.  
  
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~  
  
Part 3  
  
By Zero's Wings  
  
Nervous Break  
  
Trowa slackened his flat, pointed bangs with hair gel. He finished with the gel and combed them down until they were completely covering the left side of his face. Then, he took a copious amount of gel in hand and started applying the second coat. Quatre was sitting on the bed in their hotel room, reading a magazine. He lowered it sighed in exasperation.  
  
"How many hours is it going to take to fix your hair, Trowa?" He chuckled a bit, then got up to find a necktie to accompany his suit. Trowa's eyes narrowed and he turned to Quatre, wearing an expression that was halfway between annoyance and amusement.  
  
"It takes a long time to get it to stick this way..." Trowa was interrupted by a knock at the door.  
  
"Who is it?" Quatre and Trowa called in unison.  
  
"Relena. Heero's here too. Sorry if we're early." Quatre fished a second necktie out of his neatly packed suitcase and tossed it to Trowa.  
  
"Here, put this on. It looks good on you." Trowa caught the tie and absently flipped it around his neck a few times. He wiped the hair gel off his hands with a nearby towel and reached for the door.  
  
Trowa opened the door and was pleased to see Heero and Relena's bright, young faces. They looked so energized and refreshed; Trowa was positive that they had been having sex recently.  
  
The four of them exchanged polite hellos and how are you doings. Paltry emotional gestures, Heero thought. Emulat was telling me something. Quatre and Trowa felt slightly awkward in their formal suits, with Relena and Heero each in ordinary jeans and T-shirts. Heero took them to the old coffee house he had brought Relena to on so many cold mornings before work began.  
  
They had scones and decaf coffee and talked pleasantly, but everyone was all too aware that something was still bothering Heero. When he got up to use the bathroom, Quatre and Trowa followed him. He led them outside instead. They stepped behind a pair of dumpsters where employees took their smoking breaks.  
  
"I'm glad you guys are here," Heero began uncertainly.  
  
"What is it, Heero?" Quatre asked, his little brow furrowed up in concern.  
  
"Emulat is alive," Heero said suddenly. Quatre and Trowa froze in shock.  
  
"You mean that scientist. That guy from your past." Trowa frowned, trying to recall that night three years ago. Incredibly, it all became fresh in his mind again with little effort. "I thought you said you killed him, Heero."  
  
"I did!" Heero screamed in frustration. "I killed the shit out of him! He was a grease spot!!"  
  
"Calm down Heero," Trowa said calmly. "I think someone is trying to mess with your head.  
  
"You're right Trowa. Someone is trying to mess with my head. A certain someone named Octavian Culex Emulat. He's alive, and he still has control over me. I thought no one could help me, but I want you all here. Duo and Wufei as well. I need all of you here."  
  
"We'll call them tonight," Quatre said eagerly. "Duo is still on L2 with Hilde and his salvage business. I think Wufei is on his paid vacation from the Preventers in China. We'll track him down." Heero grunted in assentment.  
  
"Come on. We've left Relena long enough." Heero said, and he walked back into the restaurant. Quatre and Trowa followed, now sharing a worried expression as they regarded their troubled friend.  
  
Just as Relena was about to take the bill, Heero rushed in and slapped a wad of bills into their waiter's outstretched hand. "Sorry I was gone so long," he said sheepishly. The three of them sat down at the table again; all of them now looked as troubled as Heero did before they left.  
  
"I was beginning to think that you guys fell in," she said, rolling her eyes in  
  
mild annoyance.  
  
"Oh, right," Heero said distractedly.  
  
"Come on, Heero!" She demanded suddenly. "Tell me what you were talking about!" He could see the stubbornness and ferocity in Relena's eyes. Those were traits of the Peacecraft lineage that he could do without.  
  
"Did it ever cross your mind that I'm not telling you for your own good?" Heero saw her shrink back at his sudden contempt for her.  
  
"It may be for my own good, but it's killing you."  
  
"I can handle it."  
  
"Yes, I don't doubt that," she began, "but this is why you have relationships with other people in the first place. So they can help you when you're going through a rough time."  
  
"She's right, Heero," Quatre said softly. He then stared directly at Relena, almost winced a bit, and then he told her everything. Heero glared at him icily the entire time. He felt like breaking Quatre's scrawny neck. I never should've told them anything, he thought regretfully.  
  
"I should've never said anything!" he screamed hatefully, grabbing the table. With a quick turn, he flipped the table and sent coffee mugs, dishes, and silverware clattering and breaking across the floor. Heero turned swiftly on his heel and ran. He ran from his friends, he ran from his love, Relena, he ran from his complacent life, he ran from the dance of paltry emotional gestures that had become his life.  
  
Heero ran back to his apartment, nearly eight miles from the coffee shop, without so much as stopping to catch his breath. He ran into the building, pushing down his landlady in the process. He didn't stop for a moment; he didn't even notice her lying there on the cold, tile floor of the lobby.  
  
Heero rushed up the stairway, taking the steps three at a time. He refused to wait for the elevator. He ran to his door, the one with the tarnished gold numbers 88 on it, and shoved his key into the lock. With a swift kick he knocked the door all the way open.  
  
Heero brushed past his furniture and clothing, which was still strewn about the room, and headed for the refrigerator. He pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel's he had saved for emergencies. He figured this was as much of an emergency as there would ever be. He drank a fifth of the bottle in one gulp. It tasted like burning paint thinner going down his throat. Heero slumped down, bottle still in hand, and was consumed by darkness.  
  
*****  
  
Heero opened his eyes very slowly. There was a bright, red knife lancing in and out of his field of vision. His breath smelled like vomit. It was the light for incoming calls flash on his vidphone once again. He stumbled over to the phone, tripping an antique wood dresser that he had thrown across the room. He finally reached the phone and picked it up.  
  
"I knew you'd call," he said monotonously.  
  
"I want us to meet, Heero." Of course, it was Emulat's thin voice on the other end of the line.  
  
"Just name the place," Heero said.  
  
"Go to Sanc harbor. Ninth block. You'll see a ship in the first slip. The name of the ship is Revelation. Meet me on the aft deck. If you drive, it should take you about thirty minutes to get here."  
  
"I'll be there in five," Heero said. He slammed the phone down on the receiver. I've got nothing left to lose, he thought. This will end it.  
  
End of part3  
  
Author's Note: So, how do you like the fic so far? How is the second part compared to the first? Tell me everything. 


	4. Revelations 9:1

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. Oh yeah, if you haven't read at least my fic entitled 'The Awakening,' you should read that first, Otherwise, you won't get this one.  
  
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~  
  
Part 4  
  
By Zero's Wings  
  
Revelations 9:1  
  
Relena, Quatre, and Trowa hesitantly opened the door to Heero's apartment, trying in vain to prepare themselves for whatever might be behind it. Much to Relena's surprise, it was neat and organized, showing no signs of Heero's tantrum earlier that morning. All of the furniture was back in its rightful place, as was the clothing that had been thrown around. The only change was a group of three large, metal suitcases arranged in a perfect row. Heero was standing over the suitcase closest to the three of them, undoing the final latches.  
  
"What's in the case, Heero?" Quatre asked in an unsteady, fearful voice.  
  
"Very...bad...things." Heero pressed a button on the side of the right latch, and the suitcase split into separate compartments. It was filled up in a neat, organized fashion every kind of weapon and ammunition imaginable. The weapons glistened of copper and steel. Heero started pulling out several different guns, taking apart their barrels, and cleaning them in a painstaking fashion.  
  
"Heero, I don't want you doing anything dangerous," Relena pleaded. "The fighting is over. We can work everything out."  
  
"It's too late for that, Relena. Emulat is alive, and now I have to kill him." He ignored the rest of her protests, now busy constructing a compact, Czech-built M6I Submachine gun. He would end it now, end it forever. Emulat would not survive this time. Of course, he was unsure of how Emulat had survived so many times in the past, but none of that mattered to him now. He was unstable back then; he felt he had a clearer view of the world now.  
  
"Heero, I won't let you fight again." Relena said defiantly, grabbing his collar and pulling him up until their eyes met. "I don't care who it is that you think you have to kill, I'm not letting you go off on some vendetta when you could get yourself killed." For a moment, she saw his eyes grow warm and caring again. He almost smiled, almost spoke. Almost. An unseen force reached up from inside him and buried that softness. She saw only coldness in his eyes again.  
  
"This is what I am, Relena. Live with it, or don't. I'm never going to change." His words were like cold hammers upon her heart.  
  
"I simply refuse to believe that, Heero. I've seen you change so much over these past two years."  
  
"This? This is nothing," he said indifferently. Relena drew away from him, unable to stop tears from running down her face.  
  
"How could you say that?" she whispered in between sobs. He ignored her, turning back to his weapons. She stumbled back, defeated, into Quatre's arms. Quatre gave her a little smile of sympathy, knowing it would not help.  
  
Heero sheathed the weapons that dangled from his body in a leather jacket. He casually dropped a few grenades into each pocket; pulled the jacket's zipper up, put his hands in his pockets, and put his collar up. He was now wrapped in leather and gun metal from his waist to his chin.  
  
Heero sauntered toward the door until Trowa moved in like a roadblock.  
  
"Relena's right," Trowa said in his soft, concealed intensity. "You should stay with us. The preventers will take care of this. There is no reason to go get yourself hurt doing something stupid." Heero looked up at Trowa, who had grown just a few inches higher than him in the past few years. He thought Trowa would understand his motives better than Relena in this case, Trowa had been like him once before. Apparently he was wrong.  
  
"I'm not doing something stupid and I'm not going to get hurt," Heero said, trying to contain the anger, the bloodlust that had resurfaced since his conversation with Emulat. In truth, he had been conscious of it building inside him for weeks. A catastrophic event like this had brought it out in full force, squashing his dream-world of an idyllic lifestyle. He felt regret and impotence as he looked upon his friends and his lover, conveniently assembled in the same room to stand trial over his murderous instincts.  
  
"Now I'm asking you to step aside Trowa." Heero said in monotone. He was pleading to his friend as a fellow soldier and Gundam pilot, hoping that he could find some level ground to relate to the stoic, near-silent figure before him.  
  
Trowa's eyes narrowed as his response came.  
  
"Not a chance in hell." Trowa said with rare confidence and empowerment. He rose up and became a more imposing and threatening impediment to Heero.  
  
"Sorry about this," Heero muttered. He extended the palm of his hand and broke Trowa's nose in one blurringly fast motion. Trowa took a step back, dazed, and held out a hand to receive the crimson cataract from his nostrils. Heero gave him no time to recover, barreling into his chest and sending him into the far wall. He turned around and bode farewell to Relena, who shook with fury and outrage.  
  
"Heero, if you leave now, you will never see me again!" she cried out at him. He stared her down icily. In an instant, he loosened that cold, clinical composure, but only to shrug at her, uncaring.  
  
"That is your decision, not mine," he said in a crescendo of callousness. With that, he walked out, his feet crashing to the ground silently, his mouth screaming soundlessly, his mind in a state of tranquil conflict.  
  
*****  
  
A black 308 Ferrari darted in and out of traffic at ninety miles per hour. Heero checked his watch, then punched each of the four red buttons on his steering wheel. Each injected a large amount of Nitrous Oxide into the car's eight cylinders. The car exploded forward in an orgasm of acceleration, and Heero blew past cars as they frantically swerved out of his way. He reached the Sanc harbor docks a few minutes later, breathless and energized. He walked out to block nine, and saw an old, rusted steam tanker sitting in the first slip. Its name was Revelation, just as Emulat had said.  
  
Heero walked onto the deck of the boat, taking note of its rotting, barnacle-laden hull and creaking floorboards. An armed guard gestured for him to go inside the boat, down a small set of stairs. Heero proceeded, and the guard did not follow, or even seem interested by his presence. He didn't even search me for weapons, Heero thought. Such lax security. Needless to say, Heero was slightly unnerved by the fact that everything had been so easy. He would've rather been fighting every step of the way.  
  
Heero walked into a surprisingly spacious room below deck; it seemed to have been some kind of dance hall. Now, there was only a single table in the center of the room, with a bright, white spotlight shining down upon it. Seated at the table was a man that Heero had dreaded for his entire life, a face that he had never hoped to look upon again. Even after destroying that face by his own hand, Heero still feared Dr. Octavian Culex Emulat. The man was an old nightmare who had been reformed. Heero was living out his most terrible dreams, and his most terrible, scarring, childhood memories.  
  
"I've been waiting for this meeting for a long time, Heero Yuy." Emulat grinned; it was the grin of a predator toying with its prey. He had a pair of lavish meals set out before him. "I've started dinner without you. How inconsiderate. I hope you'll accept my apology, Heero."  
  
Heero said nothing, but ventured a single step forward. His hands twitched involuntarily. The veins were pulled tight over his knuckles and wound through his metacarpals in black, red, and blue gossamer patterns that were visible right through his pallid, sweat-covered flesh. It took all the mental and physical energy Heero had to control the hatred building up in the pit of his stomach. Finally, he regained control, and found he could speak normally again.  
  
"The harbor block number and the slip number, they're supposed to be chapter and verse, right? It was obvious enough with the boat's name being Revelation."  
  
"Yes, you've always been a quick one," Emulat said in a self-congratulatory tone. "Revelations 9:1...and I saw a star fall from heaven onto the earth: and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit. Your favorite passage if I recall correctly."  
  
"I haven't read any scripture in a long time," Heero said. "You were still in my head back then." The young pilot shivered. Those memories were buried in the darkest corners of his mind. Those early years of his life had marked his soul with scars, and they ran deeper then any of the scars that decorated his body. It left Heero with more skeletons in his closet than anyone truly deserved to have.  
  
"You were always my favorite. My best work." Emulat smiled, and Heero thought he saw a small flicker of sentimentality in the man's eyes. "Sorry about your life, though. When you are so far advanced beyond everyone else, you don't fit well into the human social structure." Emulat sat back in his chair and struck a match to light his cigarette. "No great loss, though," Emulat said, exhaling a gray wisp tail of nicotine. He held the match out and let it burn down until the small, yellow flame reached the tips of his fingers, then he pinched it and dropped the smoldering ashes and bits to the floor.  
  
"I have a normal life," Heero said, almost with a bit of pride. Emulat looked up with a raised eyebrow.  
  
"Is that so?"  
  
"Yes. I have many friends." Heero could not contain a triumphant smile. "And a lover." Emulat stared at him silently for a long time. After several seemingly interminable moments of stillness, Emulat broke into a chuckle. It was a thin, raspy chuckle, and it was soon borne in full as a thin, raspy laugh.  
  
"You almost had me fooled," the wiry scientist said, still laughing. "But I can see it in your eyes. That cold, blue fire...the killing fires. You have not changed as much as you might think. Your life is filled with delusions. Only you and I are real."  
  
"I'll kill you," Heero said hoarsely.  
  
"That's the spirit! That's my son!" Emulat cried out joyfully. "In any case, you won't. You can't, I assure you." He smirked and downed the last of a glass of red wine.  
  
Heero reached for the two pistols holstered beside his ankles, intending to prove otherwise. Emulat's eyes gleamed with morbid fascination.  
  
Heero moved incredibly quickly, so quickly that he didn't even notice the red laser sights that were crawling over his body. His mind was caught in an impenetrable fog, the mind-killing haze of adrenaline.  
  
Heero was violently brought out of that haze by a gunshot, not his own, that thundered with white sheets of noise and pain. The smell of burning flesh and blood wafted up from the exploded portion of his left shoe. Heero's body went limp in shock and his guns, unfired, fell from his hands. Heero's vision slowly began to darken. He was plunged into darkness from the lion's den. His departure was heralded by a distant volley of gunfire, as distant as his last tangible screams in pain.  
  
End part 4  
  
Author's Note: So, how do you like the fic so far? How is this part compared to the others? Tell me everything. 


	5. Loss Before the Flood

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. Oh yeah, if you haven't read at least my fic entitled 'The Awakening,' you should read that first, Otherwise, you won't get this one.  
  
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~  
  
Part 5  
  
By Zero's Wings  
  
Loss Before the Flood  
  
Heero opened his eyes and found himself in a grassy field. The sky was an impossibly bright blue and laced with playful white clouds. He saw Relena sitting under a great, antediluvian oak tree. Her back rested against the smooth bark of the trunk. Her legs were curled up and her small, shapely feet rested in a patch of new grass. As he approached her, the pale, golden light from a morning sun came through the tree's crowded branches. Relena was completely unclothed; and that seemed so natural, so appropriate. He had seen her without her defenses, with all her truth and vulnerabilities before him, and now his mind could not produce her in any other way. He was vaguely aware of being aroused by her nakedness, but the field and the tree and Relena seemed to be growing further and further away from him. Relena called out to him, but she was already to far away to be heard. The last thing he remembered was a single, crystal tear spilling down her powder face.  
  
Heero was in a room now, a cold metal box. The morning sun was a bright set of lights on the ceiling. Their light was hostile and glaring. It was concentrated white. The dream's inebriating effects had worn Heero's mind down to a dull razor.  
  
Heero was lying in a bed with stiff, uncomfortable sheets. His clothes were in a pile beside the bed. Lying there, quite innocuously, was his massacred left shoe. A moment later, Heero became aware of a dull pain coming from his left foot. Heero frantically pulled away the bed covers to see his foot, but he found it wrapped up in layers of bandages. He tore the pieces of cloth away from his foot furiously, his pulse racing. As he stripped away the bandages, he saw that each layer had progressively darker and larger crimson stains. Wincing in agony, Heero ripped free the final bandages, which were sopping with blood, and stared at his mutilated foot. His heart skipped a beat. Two of his toes were gone. Blown off.  
  
"I really am sorry about that," a filmy croak said. "An unfortunate accident." Heero looked up at the slight, crooked figure in the brightness of an open doorway. Of course, it was Emulat. Heero burned with rage seeing that horrible face, but Relena was still fresh in his mind, and her presence always tempered his violence.  
  
"It was not my intention to cause you harm, Heero. In fact, you are essential to bringing about a new age."  
  
"What are you talking about?" Heero demanded, choking on the fury in his throat. Heero couldn't stand looking into Emulat's venomous gaze, but it was preferable to looking at himself. He had to resist the urge to pass out each time he saw those two bloody stubs in place of toes.  
  
"I can't tell you anything about Project Ymir until my associates in Croatia are positioned. Just to be on the safe side, you understand. However, perhaps you deserve something in return for you injury. I'm sure you've been wondering how I have survived your various onslaughts, hmm? The truth is, I didn't." He grinned, then took a moment to stare at his hand up the length of his arm with a weird sense of awe. "Remarkable technology," he said with a breathy gasp of wonderment. Emulat focused his attention back on Heero.  
  
"The process of genetic engineering is a painstaking and tedious job, but the reward for your toils is nothing short of immortality. With the original Emulat's DNA codes and brain wave patterns locked away in a secure computer hard drive, which even I don't know the location of, my essence," he drummed a finger against his temple, "will never be completely destroyed."  
  
Heero was beginning to feel nauseous and light-headed. He bit his lip to distract his body from the pain of his disfigured foot. He found it increasingly difficult to follow Emulat's lecture, but it confirmed one fear of his: Emulat could not be defeated by any of the conventional means that he had been so comfortable with. It was in his blood to kill in such a way. He was uncomfortable with this elaborate game of chess that Emulat had created as a shield. Heero was a sponge to information, but he wasn't a complex thinker. Trowa had always been the analytical one. Besides, it was difficult enough to think in his present state.  
  
Heero stopped biting his lip and swallowed a mouthful of viscous, salty blood. It tasted neither good nor bad, just intensely familiar. He closed his eyes and slumped back under the covers of his bed. Within moments, he had either passed out or fallen asleep, he wasn't entirely sure which it was, but he did not dream of Relena or anyone else. He had simply fallen into a void, where he was tricked and teased with lancing spikes of pain.  
  
Heero tossed and turned restlessly in his bed. When the last pretenses of sleep faded, he opened his eyes hesitantly. Once again, there was a figure standing in his doorway, encompassed in bright light. This figure was shorter and had a more muscular build then Emulat. The man was draped in a black coat and there was a shiny object hanging from his neck. Heero focused his vision upon that flicker of light and it became the clear image of a gold, Anglican cross.  
  
"I sure hope you feel better than you look," said a familiar voice. Heero could not stop a wide grin from spreading across his face. Duo Maxwell's big, jovial face emerged in the room's sparse light. "Man, I travel all the way from L2 to find Trowa in the hospital, Relena hysterical, and you badly in need of some rescuing." Heero's smile grew even further as he was almost overwhelmed by relief and gratitude. At the last possible second, he managed to bury it all under a cold stare.  
  
"I don't need to be rescued," Heero said abruptly. Duo scratched his head, chuckling to himself. Damn! he thought. Almost had him. Ah, well. Duo offered Heero a hand flashing his warmest and most inviting smile. Heero ignored him, turning away to gather up his clothes. He slipped his socks and shoes on quickly, trying to conceal his wound from his friend, but when he stood up, fully dressed, he saw Duo's eyes as wide as saucers and his face plastered with a look of disbelief.  
  
"What happened to you?" he demanded. Heero cursed under his breath. Now everyone would know. Relena...  
  
"Duo," he pleaded, "I don't want anyone to know about this. I promised Relena I wouldn't get hurt." He let out an inhuman, animal cry and beat his fists against the cold, steel floor. "Everything's gone wrong," he yelled in frustration. "I've lost her. I've lost everything I fought for."  
  
"Come on, Heero!" Duo said, putting his hands firmly on his friend's shoulders. "Pull yourself together. You messed up. Maybe for the first time in your life when it actually mattered. But it's okay. Both of you are still alive, and you still have a chance to get her back. But to do so, you have to stop living like this. You have to give up the mission; you have to give up the killing. You have to start your life." Duo knew he was being harsh, but part of it was the anger he felt toward himself. He should've been here. He had felt sorry for himself long enough, after his breakup with Hilde. He should've been here for his friends, just as they were at his side when he had been shot.  
  
"I can't start my life," Heero said, pointing an accusatory finger past Duo. "Not until his memory has been wiped from existence." Duo turned around to see the man who had shot him in the Spice Islands less than two weeks ago. He reached in-between the fold that bisected his priestly garb and drew his weapon of choice, a Desert Eagle .50, from a custom-made spring-clip. Duo drew and pointed his gun sideways, training it on the heart of the wicked figure standing before him. He spoke to Heero without turning his head.  
  
"What's this motherless fuck's name?" Duo said hatefully. His eyes were focused with an uncharacteristic rage; the recessive yet vicious warrior side of the young man had emerged.  
  
"Why does it matter to you?" Heero asked in a dull, obnoxious tone.  
  
"He's the one who shot me," Duo answered in a quick, clipped tone. The gun in his hand was shaking; his fury could not be contained.  
  
"My name is Octavian Culex Emulat, young Duo Maxwell. It is a pleasure to see you once again."  
  
"Can't say I feel the same way," Duo growled. Emulat released a thin chuckle. The sound made Heero's blood boil. Emulat's presence was worse than ever before, because Heero now knew that he was hopeless before the scientist, more so than ever.  
  
"Come now, my child. I shot you, but your death was as necessary then as it is now. You have no reason to hold such imperatives against me. They are some of the few definites in life, and they run through my head as a constant stream. Your friend, Heero, can relate, if he hasn't buried all those awful memories.  
  
"So you're Emulat," Duo said gruffly. "I should kill you right now."  
  
"That would be a pointless gesture," Emulat said, rolling his eyes in exasperation.  
  
Duo's finger pulled the trigger. The gun roared and bucked in his hands, punctuating Emulat's sentence with a dramatic bang and a flash. Whether he had fired because of an involuntary twitch, an act of physical emergence from his subconscious, or a conscious action based on a conscious decision, Duo would never be sure. His intentions made no difference to the shrieking bullet, with it's copper hornet's head and twisted tail of molten fragments. Emulat reeled back, blood oozing forth from the hole in his upper chest.  
  
Duo's second shot was definitely intentional; he had never been surer of anything in his life. Ironically, the bullet that he had loaded with purpose was also the one that missed Emulat initially, instead skating across the metal floor and leaving a sterling track of lead in its wake. The bullet ricocheted up off the floor and caught Emulat under his chin. Blood came up like a geyser out of his flat, greased back hairline.  
  
Duo slumped to the floor, issuing a soft whimper in shock. "Heero," he said, trembling, "I've never killed anyone outside my Gundam." Heero nodded sympathetically.  
  
"It's a lot different, isn't it?" Heero helped Duo back onto his feet, and the two walked out, each favoring the other as a crutch. Duo could not control the violent shuddering of his body, and Heero's left foot felt clumsy and foreign without two of his toes. Duo shuddered as he passed Emulat's body, the scientist was wearing a grin from ear to ear.  
  
"Does he know something I don't?" Duo asked, regarding the corpse's awful smiling face. Heero nodded, also shuddering.  
  
"He'll be back," Heero whispered. Duo was about to question what Heero meant; the man was as dead as Julius Caesar, no doubt there. He did not ask simply because of the sureness of Heero's tone; it was so definitive, so absolute. From that instant on, he believed Heero's statement unquestionably. That man would be back. Somehow, he would be back.  
  
*****  
  
Duo and Heero left the Revelation without incident. The guards who had patrolled the deck of the old boat where lying around like empty paper bags, limp and unconscious from blows to the head and jaw. Duo looked at his work with a mixture of satisfaction and aversion. The two Gundam pilots left the boat with a thankful, collective sigh.  
  
To Heero's shock, Relena was waiting for him on the dock when he finally emerged from the rotting tanker. Emotions cascaded throughout Heero's gut, mixing tides of pleasure and sadness confused and overjoyed him. "She followed you here." Duo said apologetically. "That's how I found you." But Heero didn't hear him. He was already running toward Relena's open arms. The world was lost in his glorious high. Everything melted into a white light, and only Relena's face remained. Heero embraced her, then buried his head in her shoulder and sobbed in joy. He didn't care that Duo saw him crying. He was beyond caring for anything, anything except her.  
  
End part 5  
  
Author's Note: So, how do you like the fic so far? How is this part compared to the others? Tell me everything. 


	6. Aftermath in a Country Without a Good Me...

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. Lime in this one.

**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~**

**Part 6**

By Zero's Wings

Aftermath in a Country Without a Good Merlot 

A nurse in a stark-white uniform applied stitches to Heero's foot with quick craftsmanship. To Heero, she appeared irritable and abrupt. According to her watch, she had good reason to be; it read 3:15 AM. The nurse was cleansed in plastic process, hiding the moldy residue of death that lingered on every surface. She finished, left, and still Heero could not stand to look at the bloody remnants of his toes. After seeing so much violence, and having committed so much himself, he was still shocked at the juxtapositions raised by such an injury. He saw a part of his body as meat. Beneath all the emotional machinations, he was hamburger meat. Whether it be blood flowing through a bag of meat, or sparks chasing their tales through circuits, it made no difference. He was the same as the Gundams. They were—

At that moment, petal-like lips graced his cheek and found their way to Heero's mouth. Relena's flowery taste was between them. That was the difference. Zero could not love someone as he did. Heero knew these feelings were not paltry emotional gestures, they were what made him alive. They characterized life.

Heero reluctantly finished the long kiss with a swirl of his tongue. Ecstasy. He looked up at Relena's face. Her makeup had run down in pastel smears and he was reminded of the sound of her crying at his bedside. It sounded like church bells. He was about to kiss her again, and words rushed out of his throat unexpectedly. 

"I love you, Relena," Heero said breathlessly. He felt a mixture of fear and exhilaration. Heero had never said that to anyone, but who better? She was the love of his life. He had no doubt of that.

"I've been waiting a long time to hear that, Heero. I thought it had been too long." New tears were ready to spring down Relena's face, but she held them back; what she had to say was too important. "I wanted more than just being in a comfortable relationship," she continued. "I wanted love; passionate, mutual love." Heero kissed her forehead with delicacy.

"I'm sorry it took so long for me to say that," Heero said quietly, his face flushed and his head lowered. "I thought I'd lost you. It was the worst feeling in the world." He held up his brutalized foot, the coarse, black stitches like ugly bug flesh mixed with the scrapes and avulsions rendered to his fragile, pink toes. "When this happened, I realized that losing you was more painful than any physical torture I could be put through. I had felt real loss, and this," he said gesturing to his missing toes, "was nothing. You are part of me. We belong together." He drew a few strands of hair away from her face, and his hand lingered down and explored the rest of her body. Relena stood with her eyes closed, her mouth a tiny, open slit through which only a few sharp, shallow breaths could escape. Heero pulled back just before reaching that point of no return in passion. He took her hand and they left that cramped hospital room filled with the deceptive smell of plastic and disinfectants. They would continue this at home.

Duo was waiting on a small couch in the hall. He was slouched over an ashtray that said he had been up the entire night. A dozen magazines were spread over the coffee table in front of him. To Heero, the braided pilot appeared to be a haggard shell of his usually happy-go-lucky self. Even so, he was wearing a funny, little smile that didn't match his bloodshot eyes, the huge, black bags under them, or his generally withered expression.

"I'll drive you home," Duo offered in a croak. Heero nodded, and put a comforting hand on Duo's shoulder. At that moment, Quatre rushed into the room nervously, with a slightly battered Trowa in tow.

"Don't be ridiculous," Quatre protested. Trowa nodded, trying to keep a dignified expression despite the large bandage that covered his nose and most of his face. Quatre sighed empathetically at the sight of the wounded Heero, the emotionally wrecked Relena, and the exhausted Duo. "You need rest, Duo. Heero, Relena, you two should be getting home as well," he added, seeing the lust in both their eyes. "I'll have Rasid pick us up. Duo, you can stay with me and Trowa." Duo stretched out and cracked his knuckles, yawning.

"That might be a good idea, old buddy. Thanks." Duo said, chuckling tiredly. He groaned and got out of his chair, his back having already called it a night. Heero, Relena, Duo, Quatre, and Trowa left the hospital together, all limping along with their respective ails, their faces comprising an immutable flag of surrender.

*****

Heero and Relena twirled together in a flurry of passion and heat. He fumbled with her blouse, gritting his teeth in frustrated impatience. _Too many damn buttons! he thought in angrily. Finally, he managed to undress Relena, and took in her fully developed, feminine body for the first time in absolute freedom. She was beautiful, more so than he could've possibly imagined. Heero felt everything this time. It was real love, expressed in its purest form._

Exchanged kisses ran up and down every part of their respective bodies, and Heero managed to shut the door of his apartment just before becoming fully undressed himself. He felt smooth and sleek with a layer of cool sweat over his skin. He groped and twisted and kissed as fiercely and eagerly as he knew how. Even in the intense moment, Heero tried to be careful and gentle with Relena's body. It was not his property; it was a unique privilege for him to touch it. 

Heero melted the ballet of intrusive gestures back into a simple, warm kiss. He took Relena in his arms and laid her down on his bed. She looked angelic lying there, her slender figure stretched out, her golden hair splayed in all directions, her face having shed its child-like predisposition, and yet retaining her innocence and purity. God, she drove him crazy! Heero planted a few more kisses on her face and down her chest; then he lifted his head and arched his muscular back. Relena let out a soft cry, and then they fell silent in awe and pleasure. They were joined as one.

*****

Hours later, the moans and cries of pleasure finally died down. Heero fell silent, breath returned like the sparkling blue tide to fill his lungs. Soon after, he was asleep. Relena was lying beside him, her small hands caressing him in tender discovery.

Relena's hands traced over his back, an unexplored and largely unseen region, and she recoiled, shocked, as her fingers found themselves in a road map pattern of deep, rough-hewn scars. Heero rolled over completely, and she saw the terrible patterns of old lacerations, ghosts of the war. The skin that had grown over the scars was the awful pinkish-gray of rat's feet. It was wrinkled and had a rubbery texture, yet was displeasing and rough to the touch. Most terrifying to Relena was the large tattoo, in thick, black ink that was scrawled over his back, seemingly in a rage. It was a picture of an upside-down cross. The word _Dominus was inscribed upon it in a bold, flowing text. On the arms of the cross were crude stick-figure drawings, denoting kills. Relena drew in a surprised, hurried breath and covered her mouth in shock._

Heero rolled over, still half-asleep, and put his arms around Relena. "It's all right," he said in a gentle, comforting tone that she had never heard him use before. "I was a different person then. These marks, they are reminders of a time I've been trying to forget."

"It just surprised me a bit, that's all," Relena said, biting her lip. _Just ghosts left over from the war, she thought tiredly. Still, Relena couldn't help but wonder how much their relationship had changed him. She could hardly even remember what he was like when they first met. That time was all like a blur. But Relena forgot her worries easily in Heero's arms. They embraced and shared in each other's warmth. Soon they were fast asleep, sharing in each other's dreams._

*****

That afternoon, while Relena was back at work, Heero received another unexpected call. An hour later he was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the old, cast-iron bridge above a serpentine river. The structure was hard and unwelcoming, with a sort of gothic flair in its support structures, which rose up like flying buttresses. The few clouds strewn across the bruised sky were ugly, gray sacs. Just the type of meeting place Heero had expected, the instant he heard that cold voice.

The reddish fog around the bridge parted like a curtain, and Zechs Marquise walked out, his large trenchcoat billowing in the wind. He pulled the coat close around his body and shivered, pleasantly cold, just enough to make him feel alive. Few things made him feel that way, among them were being with Noin, fencing, and the cool spring winds of the Sanc Kingdom. Needless to say, comfort in a peaceful time was still an elusive state for Zechs.

"I wasn't expecting to hear from you, Zechs." Heero said in his monotonous, soldier voice. "I figured you were going back to Mars to continue the terraforming." Heero would never feel completely comfortable around Zechs, and he had assumed that Zechs felt similarly. He supposed that was why he was so surprised by this social call.

"The project hasn't started back up yet and something else insisted I stay." Zechs' voice was bitter and cold, as it had always been. It was like the lilting chimes of souls, trapped between worlds. His eyes were filled with a suppressed intensity, like a cobra, hood reared back and fangs poised to strike. Zechs reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Heero took the paper and unfolded it gingerly. It was a PDP- Potential Danger Profile, the preventer agency's version of a rap sheet. Heero's eyes widened.

"What the hell?" he murmured in shock. The sheet was describing Emulat.

"He's alive," Zechs said. "And he's in the Sanc Kingdom. He is behind the uprising in Croatia, and he will no doubt use it to try and destroy us."

"I know," Heero replied, exhaling a thin, vaporous cloud of lifestream. "The good doctor told me so himself. He called it project Yeh-meer, or something like that. Do you know what that means?"

Zechs shook his head. "We have learned that Croatia's forces are gathering on our borders," Zechs said worriedly. "They have disseminated false rumors that we are holding their soldiers prisoner within the country. The media worldwide is playing this up as an arrogant show of the power and immunity from conflict of an aristocratic, pacifist nation. Croatia's support is growing."

"I've seen all this before," Heero said, shivering. The cold air was not bothering him. "This is exactly how it was when the Sanc Kingdom fell last time." He turned to Zechs, and genuine sympathy bled through his features. He could not imagine what it was like, to lose your homeland twice, and then, in a state of absolute peace, have it lost again.

Zechs brought his fist down firmly on the iron bridge. "I will not let that happen again," he growled. Zechs closed his eyes and shuddered. When he opened his eyes back up, he was clam and collected, perhaps even relaxed. He took a bottle of wine out the folds of his coat and twisted the cork off. "The finest Merlot to ever come out of Sanc," Zechs said with a calming look of satisfaction. He smelled it with delicacy, then took a swish in his mouth and offered the bottle to Heero.

Heero took the wine in reluctance, and found that it tasted like old motor oil. He cringed, but tried to suppress it out of consideration for Zechs' feelings. To his surprise, Zechs was wearing a similarly disgusted look. They both spat the wine out over the bridge and laughed hysterically.

"I guess," Zechs began, wiping a tear from his eye and still giggling uncharacteristically, "that wine stops aging well after the first hundred years." Heero looked a bit green at that bit of information, and they erupted into laughter again.

"If my grandfather could've seen this," Zechs said, "he would smack us both right upside the head. He was so damn proud of this wine. It was the Sanc Kingdom's original legacy. Before the initial takeover, there were vineyards stretching out as far as the eye could see," Zechs said, sweeping his hand out over the fog-laden river with a grand gesture. His cold eyes were now glossed over with the warmth of reminiscence. For a moment, he was caught up in times past, when his family was still alive and intact. In sadness, his eyes lost the filmy layer of nostalgia. They were quick to turn cold again.

"I'll die before I see this country in ruins again." Zechs said, looking at Heero intensely. "I swore upon my father's grave that I would see no harm done to this place."

"I swore I'd protect Relena," Heero said. "And I'll kill Emulat if it's the last thing I ever do."

"You love my sister, don't you?" Zechs asked nonchalantly.

"Yes," Heero replied immediately, his eyes taking on a distant, impassioned look. "I love her very much. As her brother, I think you should know that I started sleeping with her about a month ago."

Zechs nodded and looked back out over the river. A second later, his mind did a sort of double take, and he turned around, his features whirling into absolute fury as he punched Heero brutally hard across the face.

End part 6

Author's Note: So, how do you like the fic so far? How is this part compared to the others? Tell me everything.


	7. Zechs and Heero after 'A Frank Exchange ...

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers.

  
**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~  
Part 7  
By Zero's Wings**

**Zechs and Heero After A 'Frank Exchange of Ideas'**

  
Chang Wufei sat amongst the clouds. As he breathed in the new life of the fog-rimmed mountains, Sally Po braided his fine, black hair. It was now almost shoulder-length and made a far more substantial band of woven braids. His breaths were shallow from the naturally thin mountain air. Sally finished the braid and planted a kiss on Wufei's cheek. He sighed and lied back on a small, silk blanket. Sally curled up beside him and stroked his forehead. He tensed up for a moment, then relaxed and let her into his arms. Wufei smiled contentedly and said to himself, Ahhhh...vacation.

  
*****

  
Heero stumbled through the halls of Preventer's headquarters. His lips were busted and coated with fresh blood. There was a cut above his eye where he'd been rammed into an iron support column. His face in general was a fantastic collage of meaty cuts and bruises; the various impact sites of Zech's fists. He hadn't had his ass kicked quite this thoroughly in years. It felt good.  
  
Oddly enough, Heero's fists were the least injured parts of his entire body. He had not returned a single punch. Heero let Zechs impart his fear and insecurity onto him, and the pain he felt with each step was a small price to pay for the final reconciliation with his greatest enemy, and more importantly, the sole protectorate of his lover. Zechs had accepted him now, and gained a sense of respect for Heero's humility. That was the true prize of the battle for each of them.  
  
Heero noticed that not a single person in the cluttered halls was coming within five feet of him. He didn't blame them. With his tattered clothing and smashed face, he was sure he looked like some demented, sewer-dwelling hobo. He finally reached Relena's office and threw himself against the door. Apparently, Relena had forgotten to lock it, and he stumbled right in, nearly falling flat on his face.   
  
Relena, Noin and Lady Une frantically rushing around the office, answering calls, yelling orders to each other in increasingly strained voices, and flurrying about in a generally chaotic fashion. Relena barely had time to look up and see Heero in his battered state.  
  
"Oh my god, Heero, what happened?" she asked, her worried, piping voice rising up a few octaves.  
  
"Zechs and I had a frank exchange of ideas."  
  
"My brother..." Relena growled in frustration. "Oh, I'll worry about him later. I'll get you some hot water and bandages," Relena said, completely forgetting about the mountain of work on her desk. Noin and Une stopped working as well; their faces also lined with concern. As Relena went to fetch the medical supplies, Heero put out a hand, blocking her.  
  
"Don't worry, I'll be fine," he said. "I brought this on myself." Relena sighed gently. Heero could see the disappointment in her eyes, but he knew she had work to do. He could take care of himself for now.  
  
Relena returned to her work and Heero got himself a drink of water from her kitchenette unit. The water cooled Heero's split, bloodied lips and washed down his ragged throat. He felt a little better, so he ambled over to the Preventer girls and asked what had gotten them up in a frenzy.  
  
"There was a schism in Croatia's government this morning," Noin said hurriedly. "The eastern side just declared war on us. We think your doctor friend is behind all this." Heero stared at her, not at all surprised.  
  
"And the fun doesn't stop there," Une interjected. "Apparently, there are reports that the eastern side of the country has been importing materials to illegally manufacture new types of mobile suits, and it has been going on for quite some time now." This truly worried Heero. The only suits still functioning in the Sanc kingdom were the Tallgeese III and Noin's Taurus squadron. They were powerful suits, but they couldn't fight off an entire army, no matter how good their pilots were.   
  
"If we're planning on defending Sanc against an attack, I'm gonna need Zero." Heero felt both apprehension at getting caught up in another war and excitement that he would be piloting the Wing Zero one last time.  
  
"Zero is the last thing you need," Relena protested.  
  
"None of these injuries are serious," Heero argued back. "I'll be fine, Relena."  
  
"I wasn't just talking about that," Relena said in quiet sorrow.  
  
"I don't want to fight either. But as long as that man, Emulat, is still alive, I will never be free to love you." Heero spoke with cold determination. Now he had more to fight for than the colonies. He was fighting for his life, and the love of his life.  
  
"I just..." Relena began, "I just don't want to lose you, after all we've been through."  
  
"I'm not planning on dying this time," Heero said softly. "I will survive. I promise." Yet even as he said this, Heero Yuy felt afraid for the first time in his life. Emulat was always the only enemy he could never defeat; the only goal he could never reach. And now, the Gundams were gone and he had been living a life of complacency, constantly weakening himself. He had never felt more exposed. He had never been in greater danger.

  
*****

  
Zechs was flying along at a low altitude in the Tallgeese. He had recently had it overhauled and re-painted. It felt smooth and new, rushing over the treetops with a fluid grace. In the spacious cockpit, he sat back and let the suit climb up into the sky. Over a vast plain of clouds that stretched out in all directions was a magnificent sunset. That golden orb of light had come to rest in the cradle of the horizon, leaving only its embers to burn pink and red in the sky. Zechs stared out at Sanc's vast farming land. Stripes of golden crop lay stretched over the earth, like wide brushstrokes thrown across a canvas of animal hide. The midsummer's wind was his only companion, and the only other witness to this wonder of the natural world.  
  
Noin's face appeared on Zechs' main viewer. She grew more beautiful to his eyes each time he saw her. Even so, he could see her anger, her warrior's passion flowing up and barely being contained within her volatile indigo eyes. "I have never been so embarrassed in my life, Zechs!" She shouted, her face flushed bright pink with boiling blood. "Heero Yuy just stumbled in here, beaten to a pulp and nearly unconscious! How could you?"  
  
"I'm sorry," Zechs sputtered clumsily. "It was my fault entirely."  
  
"I don't care whose fault it was!" Noin snapped back. "What could've possessed you to do such a thing?"  
  
"Noin...I" he began, unable to express his own embarrassment and regret over the whole incident.  
  
"Honestly, you can be such a child sometimes. I can't even-" at that moment Noin's image turned to static and her voice faded away, replaced by a foreboding, low hum that crept up from the lands under the wisps of colored clouds. Something's coming, Zechs thought. Something big.  
  
A horrible sound loomed up on the horizon like a storm cloud, and Zechs was at once made blind and deaf by various proximity alarms and flashing viewscreens. A great black form came into view, crushing the delicate fields in its ravenous march forward. Zechs could soon see many shapes; the dark mass was an army of trundling, beetle-like monsters. By their size, Zechs reasoned that they could only be mobile suits of some kind, but they were unlike any machines he had ever seen. They had whirling claws and lashing coils and chains. They were reeking of some sulfurous substance, and they seemed to radiate evil from the swirling, black metal of their armored carapaces.  
  
One of these demon suits approached the Tallgeese and Zechs defiantly drew his beam saber. It burst to life with a thunderous crackle. Swirling energies inside it combined into a deadly shaft of vermilion.  
  
One suit came too close for Zechs' liking, and he swung his saber through the suit's midsection, vaporizing layers of cold metal and sending it reeling backwards, spewing sparks and fire trails in its death throes. The next mechanical monstrosity trudged right through the mechanical innards of its fallen companion, and it leapt forward with surprising speed. Zechs impaled the suit gracefully and let it slide of the edge of his fiery sword.  
  
As Zechs cut down his demonic attackers, he called out to the rest over his communicator. "I am a holy knight born to protect the Peacecraft lineage. You will not enter this sovereignty as long as I am alive. I will fight you with my dying breath, and fight for the ideals of pacifism even as I am banished to the depths of hell itself!"  
  
With that, Zechs charged into the center of the group, slashing and hacking away in a berserk fashion. When the Tallgeese was at last overcome he let out a battle cry that shattered his main viewer, and held that furious note until he was overcome in a tangle of whips, blades and fire.  
  
End part 7  
Author's Note: So, how do you like the fic so far? How is this part compared to the others? Tell me everything.


	8. First Signs of The Storm

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. 

**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~**

**Part 8**

By Zero's Wings

**First Signs of the Storm**

Heero Yuy, Lucrezia Noin, and Lady Une all rushed down halls and stepped into a service elevator. They rode down to the basement hangar in silence. The air was filled with their tension and grim anticipation. Noin knew something was wrong the second Zech's voice began to waver on his personal transmission. A few moments later, Noin tracked the signal to the middle of the Northeastern forests of Sanc, from which numerous jamming signals radiated. And now, here they were. Heero left Relena with quick kiss on the cheek, and she let him go with a weary, worried look. It was exactly that kind of look that could get him killed, and he knew it. On the battlefield, distractions meant death, no matter how brief they were. _Don't think, just react. Come back alive._ That was Heero's code.

Halfway down to the basement, the elevator stopped abruptly. The large, armored doors of the service elevator slid back with the airy hiss of hydraulics. Standing to greet Heero Noin and Une were Sally Po and Wufei Chang. Heero hadn't seen the Chinese pilot in months, not since Duo got shot at Howard's place. 

"You have no idea how much you owe me for this," Wufei said with a low growl. "Imagine: the highlands of China, hot springs, tropical climate, on the cool nights curling up by the fire with your lover…"

"You can have my next vacation," Heero said abruptly. "Right now, I could use your piloting skills." 

_A battle!_ Wufei thought. _Well, that almost makes up for it. At least I don't have to listen to that Relena Peacecraft whine on about how I should 'give peace a chance.'_ To Heero and the others, Wufei contained his excitement and only snorted tempestuously.

Heero called Quatre, Trowa, and Duo over as well. With the three of them staying in a hotel on the same block, Heero could afford to wait for them. Besides, he just felt better getting into a mobile suit with the whole team there as support.

Trowa and Quatre arrived, acting unusually pleasant and jovial. Duo followed them in, looking just as haggard as when Heero had last seen him.

"Sure you're up for this?" Heero asked the restless pilot. "Looks like you didn't get any sleep."

"How could I," Duo protested while gesturing at Quatre and Trowa, "with those two lovebirds playing 'twister' all night in the room above me?" His expression changed to something between humor and disgust. "Anyway, it's no big deal. I went for weeks without sleep during the Eve Wars." 

"That's not all, though, is it?" Heero asked quietly. Duo shook his head and bit down on his lip.  His violet eyes whirled with sorrow like blood mixing with water.

"I'll tell you later," Duo said, his voice quivering. "I'll tell you over a drink, my treat." Duo put his hand on Heero's shoulder. It was both a show of friendship and a desperate need for the support of another human being. On the contrary, it made Heero extremely uncomfortable. With the exception of Relena, Heero still could not stand human contact. There was something poisonous about touch, some contamination of his perfect form. This was a feeling deep inside Heero, one that would never leave him. To his great relief, Duo removed the hand after a few seconds and rushed to the nearest available suit.

*****

Within moments, Noin's squadron of eight white Tauruses had lifted off and was heading for the site of Zechs' last transmission. The sun had just gone down, and the sparkling white torches of stars gave the countryside an unearthly, night time glow. 

Heero wrapped his sweaty palms around his suit's ignition handles and jetted forward. _Why am I so nervous?_ He thought, unable to rid himself of the uneasy feeling in his gut. Heero knew that the jamming signal from Zech's suit could mean anything, from simple interference from a radar tower to an invading army. Heero didn't know why, but for some reason he was sure it was the latter.

A few short moments later, the beeps of the proximity meter became so dense that they sounded like a single, annoying chirp, held for minutes on end. Heero reached up and twisted a knob on an overhead control panel. The main viewer switched from a computer construct wire frame to regular night vision. Heero pulled a lever at his ankle, and the Taurus automatically dumped an ammo clip into its rifle.

There wasn't much to see at first. Heero's night vision was obscured by Wufei's exhaust trail. Heero gritted his teeth in annoyance. He specifically told Wufei not to fly ahead of the group. He was about to express his anger over his comm. unit, but Wufei beat him to it.

"Thanks for bringing up the rear," Wufei said, dead serious. "There's something you need to see."

Heero gently landed in a large clearing. As he slid down on a retracting cable, he recognized the scents of gunpowder, grease, and fluid from a spent power cell of some type of beam weaponry. Wufei was in the middle of the clearing gesturing up to a hulking mass obscured by shadows from the treetops. As Noin's suit landed a few meters behind Heero, its shoulder-mounted spotlight revealed a wrecked mobile suit in the gloom. It was the Tallgeese III.

*****

Zechs limped out of the cockpit, shivering from the cold night air.

Heero heard the whir of another cable extending to the ground behind him. Noin rushed past him with a look of joy and relief spreading over her pale face. Zechs came down on a cable out of his own cockpit on a cable and the two embraced passionately. She began laughing and crying at the same time, the soldier's composure gone in Zechs' arms. "Zechs, don't you ever do something like this again," she whispered to him.

"Lucrezia…" he said softly, pushing her matted bangs away from her eyes.

"I mean it, Zechs," she said with mock-seriousness, "you go off on another hopeless warrior's crusade, and I'll make sure you lose more than just a mobile suit in the process." Zechs chuckled nervously, and they kissed.

Heero heard more Tauruses landing and more cables being extended to the ground. Sally, Une and the other pilots rushed toward them. Heero and Wufei saw the reunited couple begin kissing and hugging in a frenzy passion, they turned back and called to the others.

"Looks like they could use some time alone," Wufei muttered. Heero nodded warily.

"Everything's all right," Heero yelled while waving his arms. "Zechs is fine, we can all head back now."

"Hold on!" Zechs called back, managing to pull himself out of Noin's embrace for a few scant seconds. "There's something that all of you need to see." The pilots and Preventer girls followed Zechs past the wrecked Tallgeese and found a veritable wasteland carved out of the forest, with steaming piles of metal lying about, with whips and coils splayed out amongst them like intestine. 

"Wh-what are they?" Duo asked in shock. 

"I have no idea, they're unlike any mobile suits I've ever seen." Zechs said. "They're almost organic in nature." The Gundam pilots bent over various heaps of wreckage to examine the foreign machines. "I think this was only the first wave," Zechs continued, "if they had kept attacking, I wouldn't be talking to you now."

Heero ran his finger over the shiny black cover of one suit's headpiece. He removed it and found it was coated in an odd substance. It looked like ash but was slippery, not gritty to the touch. He resolved that it must be some type of lubricant.

"It seems these suits were launched from a carrier," Heero declared. "They're covered with a lubricant for a loading mechanism. Did you see how they were dropped off, Zechs?"

Zechs shook his head. "No, they just came up on me suddenly. I have no idea where they came from." Zechs turned to the other pilots.

"Have any of you ever seen something like this?" he said, gesturing to the suits. Quatre, who had lagged behind and nearly been forgotten in the confusion, stepped forward to speak.

"I have," he said. There was a terrified look in the young pilot's eyes. "I've seen this before."

Heero noticed a light drizzle of rain was upon them. A moment later, thunder struck.

*****

Relena gently shut the door of her office and locked it with an electronic keycard. She marched down the hall, rode the elevator to the lobby, and gave the keycard to a receptionist at the front desk. It was begin to rain softly outside, and looming clouds told her more was on the way. She got into a limo that was waiting on the semi-circle of pavement. "Just home," she told her driver.

Relena took a bottle of Sanc Chardonnay and poured herself a glass. It had been a trying day, and she sipped the wine self-consciously, knowing it was just too easy an escape. She rolled her eyes as she swallowed the first drop of wine. _Centuries later, the country still can't make a decent bottle of wine._ She saw the exit for her apartment coming up, and told the driver. The man nodded and turned on his windshield wipers.

There was some tension in the falling raindrops. As they increased in size and frequency, Relena felt like they were some sort of harbinger, a sign of impending doom. She laughed quietly at the thought.

"Something funny, miss?" the driver said, finally turning his head so Relena could get a good look at him. She nearly jumped in her seat. Her driver was Heero.

"When did you get back?" she exclaimed. He gave an odd chuckle.

"Just a little while ago," he said, turning back to the road. At that moment, Relena realized they had missed her turn.

"Oh, are we going to spend the night at _your_ place?" Relena said with a mischievous grin.

"Not exactly. I'm taking you to see my father."

End part 8


	9. Black-and-White Meat Locker

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. 

**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~**

**Part 9**

By Zero's Wings

Black-and-White Meat Locker 

The limousine cut through fog and darkness like a sleek, black shark. It pulled up to a dimly lit warehouse on the outskirts of town. Heero, dressed as a chauffeur, took Relena forcibly by hand and led her into the building.

"Heero, where are you taking me?" Relena yelled as he dragged her down a rusty, metal corridor. His face was frozen in a bland expression. He didn't even turn as she spoke to him. They stopped in front of a large door made of layered sheet metal. Icicles hung from the door's hinges and the spaces between vein-like cracks had frozen over. Heero tugged on a large circular valve on the door, trying to force it open. The door creaked and groaned in protest, but the valve finally unscrewed in his hands, and the door swung back to reveal an old meat locker.

Relena shivered at the icy breeze coming from the room. Inside were old hunks of butchered cows. They hung in rows from bloodied hooks as if they were part of some nightmarish art gallery. Standing between two rows of cow meat was a tall, crooked man. He was wearing an all-black formal suit, something that looked suitable for a funeral. His slender figure and jaundiced, yellow eyes gave him a sickly appearance, yet he moved as Heero did, with a fluid, almost inhuman grace.

"You're Heero's father?" Relena said quietly, her voice muffled in shock and reverence. Heero pulled out a metal chair from behind one of the meat racks and put it down in front of Relena.

"Please have a seat Miss Darlian," the tall, thin man said. "Everything will be explained in due time." Relena did as she was told, and a wisp of a smile passed across the man's face. "My name is Octavian Culex Emulat, Miss Darlian, and it is a pleasure to finally meet you." Relena repeated the name under her breath, and all the color drained away from her face. She jumped in her seat as Heero slammed the door shut behind her.

"Heero, why have you taken me here?" Relena whispered in a mixture of fear and anger, but he didn't seem to hear her. His gaze was locked straight ahead as if he were some kind of robot.

"You have done well," Emulat said, patting Heero on the head as if he were a loyal watchdog. "Now, I want you to take that gun out of your pocket, and use it to kill Miss Darlian."

Without even a mutter of protest, Heero drew his gun and trained it on his lover. She looked up and her beautiful, blue eyes widened in fear and confusion. Heero didn't even flinch as he pulled the trigger.

A dry click hung in the stale air of the meat locker, and it took Relena a second to realize she was still alive. She had wet herself involuntarily, but she didn't care. All she could think about was how Heero could've possibly done that. He had meant to kill her; she had seen it in his eyes. 

"Oh, no bullets!" Emulat said with an odd, mocking pout. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an ammunition clip. "Here, my son." Heero ejected the empty clip from his gun and put in Emulat's fresh one. Emulat piped up again just as Heero was about to fire. "Better yet! Take your loaded gun, Heero, and use it on yourself instead. I'll have a splendid little hostage!"

Heero nodded and turned the gun on himself. Relena stared at him in disbelief, and as he placed the muzzle under his chin, she cried out desperately, "Heero, don't!" He pulled the trigger without even flinching. The noise of the gun exploded across the walls of the narrow meat locker. Heero stumbled backwards; everything above his eyes was caught in a red haze, a rose of death blossoming out over his forehead. As his life quickly drained away, Relena screamed and was forced to turn away from the horrible sight. She burst into tears. Emulat laughed uproariously.

*****

Duo Maxwell sat in a singles' bar. He was drowning his sorrows in hard liquor. Heero Yuy, a fellow Gundam pilot and friend, sat on the stool next to him. "You know," Duo said with a gravely chuckle, "I just turned 18 last month." He downed a shot of Vodka in one swallow.

"You certainly don't drink like it," Heero responded, finishing his Black and White and water in more conservative sips. He studied the effects of the alcohol upon his body, noting the slow softening of his mind and the spreading warmth in his chest and throat with a clinical detachment, even though these feelings pleased him. Duo ordered more drinks.

"What's going on, Duo?" Heero asked with a carefully veiled feeling of concern. "I know there are more constructive things you could be doing with a Saturday night.

"Ah, will ya turn off the fuckin' perfect soldier mode for a minute?" Duo yelled, no longer able to control the volume of his voice.

"I mean it, Duo. You said something was going on."

"Like we both don't have enough problems," Duo muttered. "Well, it just kinda got depressing, seein' everyone around me so happy, in love, whatever, while I'm stuck here alone. Even Quatre and Trowa are goin' at it like rabbits. I mean, who saw that one coming?" Heero shrugged.

"They seem very happy together, though."

"Yeah, and that's just my point. Everyone's got their special somebody, 'cept me. It's just weird because, sex was the worst thing that ever happened to Hilde and me. That's what started it. We both decided we didn't want children, so she wanted me to get a vasectomy."

"What was the problem?"

"Oh, come on, Heero! I won't let anyone trim my _braid_!" he shouted, giving the length of hair a tug. "There's no way I'm going through with something like that!"

"That's it?" Heero asked, sounding a bit ruder than he meant to.

"Well, that was just the first fight. And you know how it goes. Then we fight about money, then about marriage, then sex again, then money…and it just kept going around and around until I came home one night, shit-faced drunk, and called her some pretty awful things. She's been living with her mom on L4 since." _What a Childish waste of a relationship_, Heero thought to himself. _I'll never let something like that happen with Relena._ Duo looked up thankfully as another set of drinks arrived. __

"Have mine," Heero said, pushing aside what would've been his fourth round. Duo took a sip of it and his face scrunched up in disgust.

"Yuck! How do you stand this stuff?" Heero was glad to inform him, although he might not have listened to all of Duo's self-pity and opened up himself had he not been just a little bit tipsy.

"A Black and White and water?" Heero asked. "Well, back when I was working as a sort of freelance assassin, I followed one of my targets to a bar. I talked with him, got him a little bit drunk, and then I ordered one of these. When the bartender got ready to mix it, I grabbed the Black and White and dunked it on the guy's head. Then, I lit his hair on fire and watched him go running and screaming around the room, looking like an oversized wax candle. Anyway, when he finally fainted from the trauma, I tossed the water on him to put out the flames, and dragged him back to my apartment to wait for further orders. True story." Duo laughed so hard at this, he nearly fell off his bar stool.

"Thanks, I needed that," Duo said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. "And the most fucked-up thing about this is, I know you really did it too." The bartender gave them both a weird look, shrugged, and went back to polishing a cold beer mug.

"Last call boys. Bottoms-up and hit the streets," the bartender said in a bored, monotonous tone. It was what he said every night.

"Well, if you didn't have Relena back home," Duo started, "this is where I'd take you out on the town and get both of us laid."

"I'll call a cab for both of us," Heero replied.

"Thanks, man." Duo said. "And I just want you to know, I've never raised a glass to a better friend."

*****

The soft sound of Relena weeping echoed off the metal walls of the freezing meat locker. Her lover was lying in a pool of blood. Emulat's raspy cackling had ended far earlier and he was growing tired of her. "Shut up!" he yelled, pistol-whipping her across her soft, left cheek. She continued to cry, just a little bit softer. "Here, maybe this will make you feel a bit better," Emulat said, defeated at last. "That pathetic sap over there? He's not _your_ Heero Yuy." Emulat got up and kicked the bloody corpse over onto its back. He ripped open the back of Heero's shirt. Relena recognized the tattoo, the menacing upside-down cross that was emblazoned on the corpses' back.

"See? Fifteen marks on the cross. This is model 15. The one you know is model 18, and has that many marks on his tattoo. I kept 1-17 in cold storage rooms like this one for the past ten years. I never thought I'd use them again. They were all so inferior, they couldn't process complex emotions like yours can." Emulat kicked the body back over so that Relena could take in that horrible sight once again. The sight of her one love, eyes wide and glazed over; his pale face streaked with gore. Relena was hit by an overwhelming wave of nausea, and she was sure that she would throw up in the next five seconds. Somehow, she held it down and managed to turn away from Emulat and the corpse.

As Relena sat shivering in a corner, rocking back and hugging her knees, Emulat strolled up to her in a lackadaisical fashion. He held out a large, inviting hand and his eyes took on a milky, golden hue. "Come my dear," he rasped. "My prodigal son…your lover. He will come for you."

"Are you really his father?" Relena whispered.

"We share no genetic material, but I am the father of what he has become. I was responsible for his rebirth, as a soldier."

"I have seen him reborn again!" Relena argued fiercely. "He is no longer the heartless killing machine that you wished for. In fact, he never was."

"You don't know him the way I do," Emulat said. "I've been in his head."

"And you don't know him like I do," Relena countered. "I've been in his body." Relena would've never said something like that in public, or even amongst her friends, but she declared it to this vile man without so much as a blush. She was proud to be his lover.

"I can't compete with that," Emulat said chuckling. He grabbed Relena's wrist and pulled her up. His thin lips curled back in a fierce sneer. "Yet it doesn't matter," he spat. "I know how his mind works, and I know that by the time he comes after you, Ymir will have covered this world in ice. You should feel honored. You'll have a front row seat for the apocalypse."

End part 9


	10. The Second Call

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. 

**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~**

**Part 10**

By Zero's Wings

The Second Call 

Heero escorted a nearly unconscious Duo back to his hotel. As he parted with his drunken friend just outside the revolving glass doorway, rain began to fall. The storms had been off and on all night. This was the storm of which Trowa had spoken, Heero was sure of it. It was the watery catharsis that would herald doom for them all.

Heero yanked the collar of his tattered leather jacket up to his cheekbones. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked into a curtain of rain.

Heero's apartment was a hollow shell without Relena. The night without her was hollow as well. He splashed some hot water on his face, but his veins were still ice. _Why do I feel like this?_ Heero thought. He stared at the pallid, foreign moon in the mirror with a mixture of dread and confusion. His eyes were spheres of jagged glass; his lips were drawn as a short, bloodless strip. Heero shivered in his deepest sleep, but no dreams came to him.

Around 1:30 in the morning, Heero received a call. As he reached for the vidphone on his nightstand, he felt a sudden muscle spasm in his arm, and a cold tremor radiated from his fingers across the length of his arm and straight down into his gut. After a slight pause, he wearily picked up the receiver.

"Who is it?" he croaked.

"It's Lady Une, Heero. I was just checking to see if Relena ever made back to your apartment."

"No she didn't. I assume she stayed over at Preventer's HQ."

"The doorman says he saw her leave at 9:30. We haven't heard from her since, and the limo driver that took her home never checked back in."

Heero's pulse quickened. "Do you have any idea where he was supposed to take her?' Heero asked.

"She usually just goes straight to your place or her house by the old Sanc palace. I can't imagine wh…" Une was cut off by a sudden jolt of static.

"Une!" Heero yelled desperately in the phone. There was no reply. Just as he was about to hang up the phone, the static was swallowed up by a deep, dry laughter.

"You know, it really came in handy putting a hard-line into Preventer H.Q. Not only do they keep extensive files on the whereabouts of you Gundam pilots, but they also have your home phone numbers." Emulat sounded as twisted and arrogant as ever, even when Heero could not see his face.

"You son of a bitch!" Heero screamed back into the phone. His hatred toward Emulat was so deep; it came to him almost as a reflex. "When are you going to let me be?"

"You have more pressing concerns." Emulat said dismissively. "I just wanted to bid farewell to my most traitorous creation.  You see, I have decided to rid this fledgling planet of an arrogant and self-satisfied race. Mankind has had ample time to redeem itself, but we only repeat our past mistakes and failures. You know, many people believe that animals and lower life forms don't have souls. They believe that our superior intellect gives us exclusive rights to an immortal, non-physical consciousness. But only our egos separate us from other forms of life!"

"I've heard this speech before." Heero said. "I recall it was just before your death."

"You mean the death of one of my many containers. With this cycle of clones, I have transcended death. And I will be the first human to carry on in the form of a non-corporeal presence. You see, Ymir, my child, will destroy the colonies and lay waste to the earth, ridding it of all but the most resilient and basic organisms. Then, it will be destroyed in the fires of this changed world. In a reproductive schism, it will sacrifice itself so that its race may populate the new Earth.

"What is this Ymir?" Heero asked. "You've mentioned it before."

"The Norse god responsible for the creation of heaven, hell, and the domain of man. But presently, Ymir stands as my greatest achievement. He is a living mobile suit. And when your world ends, he will retain my consciousness in the mechanized portion of his brain. I will be the sole survivor of this race."

"I've never heard anything more selfish or arrogant," Heero retorted. "How could you possibly presume to stand as judge over your entire race, and then choose to condemn your own kind?"

"Name me a better judge!" Emulat argued back. "Most people are so wrapped up in their daily lives that they can't function outside their so-called "real world." They're blind, soft, and wallowing in the meaningless nature of their own existence. And then there are people like you: cold, antisocial and nihilistic. You're pathetic. You can't even function within the simple grind of humanity. People who lack your biological gifts are ten times as effective in just living out their lives. You wallow in self-pity, ignoring every natural call to rise above the lesser mass of your race. You're a complete failure, by anyone's standards!" Emulat burst into spiraling peals of laughter.

"That's enough!" Heero screamed, his voice becoming hoarse. "What have you done with Relena?" He felt lost in his own fury, being swallowed up by cascading emotions.

"Ah, the girl. A very practical concern. You've always been one to get to the heart of a matter. She is the precise reason I'm calling you now. I believe that your relationship with her is the closest you've ever come to any sort of personal achievement. Despite that, you can offer her nothing. I can only assume that she feels pity for you." Heero was haunted by those words. Earlier this week, he had contemplated the exact same thing. "Anyway," Emulat continued, "I was just wondering if you'd ever like to see her again."

"As much as I want to bury you forever, Emulat." Heero said, his voice shaking with intensity.

"Oh. How very unfortunate for you. Because neither of those things will ever happen." The line went dead.

End part 10


	11. Varazdin Fog

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. ~ Skeletons in the Closet ~ Part 11 By Zero's Wings  
  
Varazdin Fog  
  
Trowa stood in front of the mirror of his hotel bathroom, carefully unwrapping his bandaged nose. He finally pulled free the last strip, washing away dried blood and fuzzy bits of cloth. Trowa winced as he rubbed his hand up the bridge of his nose. Damn that Heero, he thought. He always has to have the last word.or the last punch. Trowa groaned a bit as he ran his hand over the crumpled section of his nose.  
  
"Don't worry about it, Tro." Quatre stepped out of the shower behind Trowa and smiled sympathetically. "You still look great to me."  
  
"Thanks, Quatre. I honestly-" Trowa was interrupted by the harsh ringing of his phone. Quatre rushed into their room, still naked and sopping wet, leapt on the bed and grabbed the phone. Duo, who had been lying in the next bed over, nursing a killer hangover, quickly averted his eyes.  
  
"He-hello?" he managed between peals of laughter, as Trowa tried to yank him off the bed by his ankles.  
  
"Is this Quatre?" a stern voice asked.  
  
"Yeah Heero, it's me-Trowa lay off!" Quatre turned the call to speakerphone, then reached back and smacked Trowa over the head.  
  
"Is this a bad time?" Heero asked cautiously.  
  
"Always with these two," Duo groaned before turning over again.  
  
"No, no, it's fine," Quatre said, exasperated. "What do you need?"  
  
"I need you, Trowa, and Duo to get your asses down to Preventer HQ." With that, Quatre fell silent and serious. He sat up in his bed and motioned for Trowa to calm down. Trowa noticed his lover's somber expression immediately and mouthed 'what's wrong?' Quatre shook his head.  
  
"What's up, Heero?" This time, Quatre waited through a long pause.  
  
".Relena's been kidnapped," Heero answered with a catch in his throat.  
  
Trowa looked up in surprise. "What, again?"  
  
*****  
  
Soon Quatre, Trowa, Duo, Wufei, and Zechs were all packed into Lady Une's office. Heero sat behind her desk, running both his hands back through his hair nervously. He wore a mournful expression.  
  
"Emulat contacted me last night," Heero said in a voice that quivered on the edge of grief. "I think it's safe to say he's gone insane. His little uprising in Croatia just gathered funds for his real project."  
  
"And what project would be?" Zechs said impatiently. "And more importantly, how does it involve my sister?"  
  
"His project involves everyone in the world, and the colonies." Heero lifted his head up slowly; then cast his stormy eyes across the room. "His project is the apocalypse." He let everyone absorb that in silence.  
  
"I believe that he is going to make coordinated attacks on military facilities around the world. Those insect-type mobile suits that Zechs and Quatre encountered will be his shock troops. However, I believe that this will just be a distraction. His real plan revolves around something else, some kind of weapon that he calls Ymir."  
  
"And how are we going to prevent this?" Wufei asked skeptically. "The gundams are gone, remember?"  
  
"Zero isn't. It'll be fully operational within the next 14 hours."  
  
The icy blue orb of Zechs' right eye swiveled toward Heero. "Emulat can do a lot to Relena in 14 hours," he muttered.  
  
"I'll make the final adjustments to Zero while we're underway. The suit is actually 80% operational already."  
  
Duo shook his head in wonderment. "You slick sonofabitch. All those visits to the Smithsonian."  
  
Heero ignored him. "Sally Po has been tracking the limo that Emulat had Relena in. The GPS system in her main computer has tracked them to the remains of the city of Varazdin, near the Hungarian-Croatian border. " Just as he had finished his sentence, Une and Sally burst through the door, trailing paperwork behind them in a frenzy.  
  
"We've got their location." Sally said breathlessly. She handed Heero a portable GPS unit.  
  
"Then we've got no time to lose," Heero said. He got up and strode out of the room confidently. The others were soon following him, albeit in a bewildered fashion.  
  
*****  
  
After a quick, cramped elevator ride, the group arrived at the Preventer's underground hangar bay. As the metal-plated elevator doors slid back, Heero's stoic expression nearly broke into a grin, but he caught himself. Everyone else was too busy picking their jaws off the floor to notice.  
  
Noin's unit of Tauruses had been completely revamped. Most noticeable was a new coat of paint for each, removing their tranquil white jackets and replacing them with fierce splashes of red, passionately melding orange, and biting yellow streaks. They seemed to burn from inside with the fires of war. Besides their frightening new appearance, the suits had been outfitted with shoulder-mounted launchers, filled with missiles.  
  
Noin slid down to greet them on a tow cable. "Impressive, aren't they?" she said, looking quite proud of the suits. "They have new, extra-strong armor that's made from a titanium-carbon alloy. Their rifles are also new, filled with 3-meter caseless rounds with explosive tips. They'll easily penetrate a building. Those missile launchers contain the new, high-maneuver heat seekers." Noin paused for a moment, as everyone was still frozen in a stunned silence. "Any questions, boys?" she said with a sexy smirk. Zechs just about died on the spot.  
  
"Sweet!" Duo finally exclaimed.  
  
"Indeed," concurred Wufei, who was similarly impressed.  
  
"Excellent work, Noin," Heero said. "When can we be underway?"  
  
"As soon as you are all ready. I'm going to be finishing up the repairs to Zechs' Tallgeese. Zechs and I will protect Sanc while you're away."  
  
Heero turned to Zechs, surprised. "It's not like you to turn down the chance for a battle," he said.  
  
Zechs simply smiled and put his arm around Noin. "My days of fighting are over," he said. "I have more important things to look forward to. You will as well, Heero, when you get Relena back."  
  
Heero nodded. "Yes, that's why I have to fight again. To kill again."  
  
I will never kill anyone ever again.I don't have to anymore.  
  
Heero shook his head free of the memory. "Zechs, thank you for protecting Sanc for us."  
  
"It's the least I can do," Zechs replied. "Emulat won't get anywhere near us with Noin in charge." He kissed her cheek. She smiled slightly, but was soon serious again, and pulled away from him slightly.  
  
"Enough of this," she said. "You've got a job to do."  
  
Heero nodded. "I'm gonna get Zero." He walked back to the elevator, wished everyone good luck, then descended further into the bowels of Preventer HQ.  
  
*****  
  
The elevator came to a shuddering stop at the final sub-basement. The doors parted and the elevator filled up with darkness. Heero stepped out; felt along the wall for a light switch. He found an electronics panel and flipped every stitch to 'on.'  
  
The huge, overhead arrays of lights opened up, and blazing white light cascaded into the room. Heero looked up, his face whirled with feelings of pleasant nostalgia and newfound awe. The great Wing Gundam Zero knelt before him, its angelic wings spread out to their full berth. But instead of white feathers, its wings now contained silvery, knife-edged metal implants. The sharp, green gems in its eye sockets flashed to life and its arms opened to accept its pilot.  
  
"Hello, old friend," Heero said warmly.  
  
*****  
  
Duo sat at the controls of his new Taurus suit. Its cockpit was a bit more cramped than the one he was used to in Deathscythe, but it still had ample room for all his equipment. On the consoles around him he saw Quatre, Trowa, and Wufei in their own fierce-looking suits, but Duo had not seen Heero since they left him in the hangar. There had been no radio contact either. He scanned the billowing clouds worriedly. That asshole better not be late, he thought. This whole plan is riding on him, and I don't know what kind of a fight we can put up without Zero.  
  
The four Taurus suits descended from the clouds into more clouds, a thick layer of pale, unearthly fog. The skies above had already darkened as they made their final approach on the city of Varazdin. After three hours of flying, their suits passed a first desolate chunk of debris. An entire city, ruined and left barren by firestorms, was slowly approaching them through the fog.  
  
Buildings leaned and bowed crookedly, scraggly brick and plaster hung like loose flesh on bones. Jagged metal supports, stripped bare of the buildings they held, reached up toward the mobile suits like the desperate clutches of the starving. But no one starved in Varazdin. All that was left of the inhabitants was the ash and bone meal that carpeted the ground.  
  
For a moment the fog cleared away from Wufei's viewer. His olive-colored eyes shot across the desolate landscape, searching with cold precision. His tactical mind was built like a steel trap, and it was truly his only mind when he thought about something with interest and passion. Perhaps that was why all his human relationships had suffered awkward, ambivalent fates. In a battle, however, his way of operating could bring him nothing but good fortune. It did once again, as he noticed two large figures in the middle of a clear patch from the surrounding fog.  
  
"Everyone stop!" Wufei yelled, jamming on his air brakes. "Switch to infra- red!" As soon as he switched his viewer mode, Wufei realized they should've had it on the entire time. Their little group had already been surrounded. Heavily surrounded.  
  
Quatre swiveled his Taurus's lead camera, looking in awe and fear at all the suits that had been amassed against him. There were hundreds of the vile, spiny foes slowly marching toward them through the fog. Their glistening whips could be heard thrashing violently through the fog. And sure enough, they were the same demonic, insect-like suits as the one he had faced in that desert, so many years ago. "Brings back memories," Quatre muttered as the suits began to close in, "Bad ones."  
  
End part 11 


	12. Taskforce Jormungand

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. ~ Skeletons in the Closet ~ Part 12 By Zero's Wings  
  
Taskforce Jormungand  
  
Four of the Gundam pilots, auspiciously lacking the commanding presence of Heero Yuy, were being slowly surrounded by nightmarish enemies. A stern male voice crackled in over the group's loudspeakers. "Taskforce Jormungand has surrounded the target."  
  
Quatre noticed now that their hulls did not shine like the slick, ebon wings of a scarab. That was what he had seen, beetle-like and seemingly imbued with mystical strength and cunning. But these suits were different, and he may not have recognized them, except for their lashing appendages. These suits were painted the frosted white color of an eggshell. They appeared seamless and just-formed, almost innocent before they would embrace you with their brutal tendrils.  
  
Quatre decided to take command in the absence of Heero. He had gained respect and self-confidence as the leader of the Gundam troops, but that was before he had Trowa to rely on. Now, with wavering motivation and distracting emotional attachments, his leadership was left unfocused and unsure. It didn't help that Heero had removed the ZERØ system from Sandrock almost two years ago.  
  
"Listen up," Quatre said with as much authority as he could muster. "The suits haven't advanced enough for close range combat, so we still have a chance. We'll need a suppressing fire with your strongest long-range weapons. Before they can react, we'll combine our plasma thrust and launch ourselves out of the fray." He sat nervously, waiting for a response. "Does that sound good?" he asked, unsure, still waiting for approval.  
  
"Sounds great to me, Quat!" Trowa's soothing voice relaxed him considerably.  
  
"No problems." Wufei's bland confirmation was more than enough.  
  
"Yeah! Lets bust a few rounds in these muthas!" Duo's cheer gave Quatre a giddy, cocky attitude that almost convinced him that they could pull it off. Almost.  
  
"Let's do it!" Quatre yelled.  
  
*****  
  
Heero drifted through the clouds on a pair of metal wings. He felt the sun embracing him from far above, blessing him with golden warmth. He was free; ZERØ had liberated his soul. Relena's voice was so distant to him now; her cries to accept her love and compassion were muted and remote. He was becoming less human, but it felt so good, it felt so right.  
  
Heero was genuinely excited by the approaching conflict. Life and death were things that he distributed equally, and one did not take priority over the other. He honestly wouldn't have minded dying at that very moment, even though he had assured himself that was no god, and no life after death.  
  
Far below, as remote as Relena's plea, were the sounds of a battle. A losing battle. His friends were dying, but somehow he didn't mind. Zero told him that he had no enemies, so there was nothing to become excited about. Heero embraced the light that filled his cockpit, thanking the sun for its warmth. However, what he thought to be the light of the sun was actually the golden aura of the ZERØ system.  
  
Heero was at peace, but it was not meant to be.  
  
*****  
  
Quatre, Trowa, Duo, and Wufei huddled together in their Taurus suits, their rifles blazing. Star-shaped muzzle flashes burst from each gun. Tons of spent shell casings spewed from the rifles and rained down upon the decrepit landscape. The white beetle suits advanced and were cut to pieces, bits of arms and legs flying through the air. White-yellow sparks sprayed from armless sockets like blood. The frenzied chatter of the rifles was punctuated by the occasional explosion. Buildings crumbled, rocks exploded in the white heat, and a few abandoned cars were swept up into a balletic tornado of debris.  
  
For Quatre and the others, the situation was growing desperate. For every one of the demonic suits that they were able to take down, five more came from behind to take its place. They were never given an opening, and the enemy suits had closed the distance for a close range melee. The Taurus suits were quickly torn up and mangled by whirring saw blades and lashing chains. The structural integrity of each suit was being threatened.  
  
"Let's get the hell out of here!" Duo yelled. One of the monstrous suits had actually gotten up on its back and was tearing into his main engine.  
  
"Agreed!" Trowa yelled. "Everyone fire your main thrusters on the count of three!" Quatre, Trowa, Duo, and Wufei all dropped their rifles and engaged their rear jets, counting down together.  
  
".3." The enemy suits took advantage of their lowered defenses, impaling the Tauruses with needle-like bores and attempting to drill straight into their cockpits.  
  
".2." The whirring drills reverberated in each of the pilot's ears. They could hear the armor of their suits cracking.  
  
".1." The drills broke through. A bulkhead to Quatre's left disappeared, and shrapnel missed his forehead by inches. Wufei's main viewer blew apart, and a rush of sharp glass cascaded over his face. One crooked shard slipped into the white flesh on the underside of his right eye. He would never see through that eye again.  
  
"Go!" Trowa and Quatre screamed, releasing and igniting their plasma fuel. Duo ignited his an instant later, and Wufei's ignited an instant after that.  
  
The beetle-like suits of Taskforce Jormungand had advanced too quickly, and had not considered a defensive position. More than half of them were vaporized instantly as they met a tidal wave of superheated plasma. The rest were simply knocked back by the shock wave, and their appendages melted away in the heat wave. They hit the ground as nothing more than the dismembered torsos of mobile suits. The pilots inside had been cooked by the hot metal armor that was supposed to have protected them.  
  
The Tauruses managed to drift along for about a quarter mile before it became apparent that there engines had been irreparably damaged. Duo's engine had been particularly chewed up, and he was the first to start to lose altitude.  
  
"Duo, eject!" Quatre yelled, as he saw dense plumes of black smoke trailing behind the suit. In the next instant, Duo's Taurus collided with the glass face of an office building, causing thousands of window panes to explode into glistening fragments. The building shot by the other Tauruses, and Quatre caught only a brief glimpse in his rearview mirror of Duo's mangled suit stuck in the side of the building. In the next moment, he realized how close he had drifted toward the speeding turf. He quickly hit his air brakes and tried to pull up in vain, but it was too late. One of his wing- tipped shoulder blades caught a light post in a vacant parking lot, and he crashed along the ground, his Taurus spinning and dragging itself end over end in a boneless pile.  
  
Trowa felt a dull buzzing somewhere behind his eyes, and assumed he had died in his collision with a series of trailers. Slowly though, he was able to differentiate between light and dark. He felt shadows pass over him erratically, flashing dark, light, dark, light, like the beating copper wings of a dragonfly against a night sky. Eventually, his vision returned completely. Trowa was lying on the floor of his cockpit. His main viewer had shattered and the armor had been stripped away, exposing him to the open air. The dancing shadow he had seen was a wispy brown cloud of dust twisting in the sunlight. He struggled out of the cramped mobile suit and dropped to the ground.  
  
Trowa stood up in the massive trench that his suit had dug through the pavement. His piloting chair had been thrown from the cockpit, and was lying on the ground in several crumpled pieces. He sighed slowly; doubting anyone else survived their crash. Am I alone again? he wondered.  
  
Trowa walked past abandoned buildings and mountains of rubble, feeling very small outside his mobile suit. The place was silent, even the call of vultures or the buzzing of insects was absent. This place must've been a testing ground for those suits, Trowa thought. There's absolutely no sign of life anywhere. He shuddered as he thought of those great mechanical insects tearing a crowded city down to dust.  
  
Trowa trudged on, clumsy from fatigue, for an indiscernible length of time. He passed more ruined buildings, more debris, and so on. The dilapidation of his surroundings was becoming monotonous. Just as Trowa was considering falling down and lying there until he joined his friends, he was blinded by a glaring metal surface. To his joy, it was the sun, reflecting off the armor of another Taurus suit. As he came closer, shielding his eyes from the intense rays, his smile faded and his face fell. It was only the arm of a former mobile suit. The Taurus's arm had been savagely ripped off at the elbow joint. Thick black wires and circuitry trailed out behind it, drooling sparks. Trowa felt like screaming in frustration, but he opened his mouth and no sound came.  
  
It was a lucky thing that Trowa did not choose that moment to scream out loud, because he would've missed the faintest sound of someone coughing up dust beneath a rubble pile. Trowa heard it and rushed for the nearest pile of wreckage. He rabidly pulled away hunks of metal and chucked them behind him blindly. All that mattered was the person underneath, the world could be ending behind him and he wouldn't have looked away from the pile for an instant. Please let it be Quatre, he pleaded. Please let him be alive.  
  
Trowa got to the bottom of the pile and there was Duo staring at him, his violet eyes as big as saucers. Trowa's lean, frenzied expression was quickly covered, replaced by his usual expression.  
  
"I can always count on you for a warm welcome, Tro." Duo smirked then feebly lifted a hand so Trowa could pull him out of the ruined heap.  
  
"A welcome from what?" Trowa asked, his voice flat and unwavering.  
  
"Back from the dead, I guess." Duo eyed the hacked-off metal appendage on the ground. He turned back and cam face-to-face with a completely different Trowa, and intensely emotional person who was obviously in considerable pain. "What's wrong he said, bringing Trowa's chin up with a gloved hand.  
  
"Sorry," Trowa said, his lower lip quivering. "I.I was kinda hoping you were Quatre," he confessed. His voice was unlike anything that Duo had heard escape those cold lips.  
  
"Trowa," he said in a rare serious moment, "It's cool. I understand."  
  
Trowa and Duo walked on, bracing each other periodically to keep from heat exhaustion. As the sky started to turn a pastel orange, Trowa stopped in his tracks. He raised his head up and delicately sniffed the air. "There's something burning."  
  
"Probably just some old tires," Duo said wearily.  
  
"No, it's more like a chemical smell. Probably a flare."  
  
"Holy shit, that could be the others!" Duo exclaimed.  
  
Trowa nodded. "Let's go."  
  
End part 12 


	13. Crimson Tears

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. 

**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~**

**Part 13**

By Zero's Wings

Crimson Tears 

Heero's eyes slowly opened, and he found himself staring out at an incredibly vast carpet of pastel clouds. He had risen above them, and Zero had already touched the atmospheric ceiling. The sun was an incredibly bright orange nexus, from which long, ribbon-like strands of golden light radiated. Heero felt like he was in heaven.

Heero was so entranced by the euphoric haze of the ZERØ system, that he didn't even notice he had put his Gundam into a rapid, unforgiving descent toward the ground below. 

*****

Trowa and Duo reached the source of the flare, a makeshift campsite. The moment Quatre and Trowa's eyes met, they both broke into a full run, and embraced amongst the ruin and decay of the former city. Tears were streaming down both of their faces. Then all eyes turned to Wufei, who was slowly stumbling up to greet the rest of the group. He gave everyone a quick smile and a nod, but received only shocked stares in return. The right side of his face was covered with a blood-drenched towel that had been tied down around his head with a knotted piece of Duo's flight suit.

"I'm just fine, so you can all stop staring," Wufei said gruffly. Even he was unsure of this, but his wound wasn't infected, and it didn't seem that his right eye could be salvaged by any amount of treatment anyway. Everyone rushed to help him, comfort him, but he pushed them all away almost as a reflex. In all honesty, though, he was the most frightened of all of them. 

Trowa and Quatre collected their supplies and belongings while Duo and Wufei rested. It would be difficult to move quickly on foot with two injured men. Trowa scanned the desolate landscape for some method of transportation, but it was obvious that no machinery had worked in the city for decades.

Collectively, the four of them couldn't help but almost constantly ask: _Where the hell was Heero?_ None of them expressed this vocally, but they were all thinking it, and they were thinking it rather bitterly.

The group pressed on, finding nothing but ruins ahead and behind them. Soon, their pace lagged and it became apparent that they could not continue without rest or food. As the sun slipped into the cusp of two ragged buildings, the group collapsed, exhausted.

Quatre, Trowa, Duo, and Wufei cast lean, frightened glances at each other. They all knew: there was no food, and there would be no rest. 

Duo let out a disheartened sigh as he dropped to the ground, finally giving a voice to the question that had been twisting in everyone's side. "Where in god's name is Heero?" he yelled to the sky, as if the some divine light would bestow the answer upon him from the heavens. Ironically enough, it did.

The clouds were suddenly driven back in a radial pattern as piercing orange light from the setting sun rushed through the gap. Out of this gaping wound in the atmosphere, a glimmering seraph, wrapped in a brilliant coat of steel, descended to earth. It passed below the scraggly tips of the taller buildings, falling blindly but gracefully. Just as everyone ducked for cover from the impending impact, the metal being seemed to awaken, and it began to turn upward. Against the golden shoots of sunlight, it opened a pair of heavenly, silver wings and curved up into the sky. Its coursing through the air made a perfect bell shape.

"That must be Wing Zero…" Wufei said in awe. None of them had seen anything quite so beautiful in a device born out of the need for destruction. The suit circled the area once and then landed, causing jets of dust to billow up around it.

Everyone rushed to see Heero emerge from the cockpit, and the air was thick with anxiety as the front of the suit slowly opened. Heero stepped out shakily, still wearing his black, form-fitting g-suit. His breaths were labored and erratic. As the other pilots drew near to help him down, they saw a characteristic golden glow in his eyes. "The ZERØ system," Quatre said in a kind of frightened awe, taking a step back.

The glow faded suddenly from Heero's eyes, and everyone shuddered and let out whispering cries. Heero's eyes were full of blood. The ZERØ system had pushed him too far. He closed his eyes and grimaced painfully as a crimson tear formed in each of his eyes and rolled down his face. The two red streaks met at the bottom of his chin and dripped to the ground. Heero's face reminded Trowa of his clown mask.

Heero stumbled forward and seemed to faint in mid-step. He fell, silently, from the platform in the center of his mobile suit. All four of his fellow pilots rushed to grab him, but they knew they wouldn't be able to catch him in time. Everyone winced when his body hit the ground, and his legs tangled together so badly that they all knew he must've broken them.

Trowa was the first to reach the fallen pilot, and felt frantically for a pulse in Heero's wrist. The second he picked up his friend's arm, he felt sick. It flopped about as if it was made out of toothpaste. Trowa breathed out a huge sigh of relief, however, when he found that Heero still had a pulse.

"It's all right," Trowa said. His voice was soft and full of relief, despite his expressionless face. "He's alive."

A moment later, Heero awoke with a shudder. He could see the faces of his fellow pilots now, as all the blood had left his eyes and formed dried, caked splotches on his cheeks. He coughed a bit and asked for some water, to which Duo eagerly extended his canteen. Heero drank voraciously, and water ran from his mouth and formed dew-like droplets in the stubble that lined his face.

"I'm glad you're okay, Heero," Quatre said quietly.

"We all are," Duo chimed in.

"I…I'm sorry I wasn't here to help," Heero replied. "I didn't know the ZERØ system could have such an effect on me after all those years. It clouded my mind. It wants me to die."

"I have just one question," Trowa said. "Why did you turn that system on in the first place?"

"I was just too worried about Relena," Heero admitted. "It was going to get me killed, worrying about losing her. The ZERØ system helped me focus."

"That system is evil," Quatre said. "It will never be of any aid to us. It can only harm us, and the people we care about." He remembered firing upon Trowa, nearly killing the most important person in his life.

"I just didn't want to lose that focus," Heero said. "I was bred for battle. I just can't stand losing that absolute control of myself."

Trowa looked his fellow pilot in the eye sternly. "But you left the battle behind you, just as we all have. You became in touch with your own humanity. Relena helped you do that. That's one of the reasons you love her so much."

"I guess that's true," Heero said. _The endless fighting. Living on the edge of a razor. That's what I gave up. That's what…she…helped me give up_. Heero's mind was slowly breaking free of the ZERØ system's chains. _I can live again_, he thought.

Heero began to lift himself up onto his feet, and stopped in a crouch. _Something's holding me down, though_. _What is holding me back? _He asked himself in a silent panic. A horrible face entered his thoughts, a face which his mind instantly recognized as a banner of hatred and revulsion. Everyone winced as Heero finally rose to his feet, amidst the crackling noises of joints and bones being popped back into place. At last, his journey, his trial, had presented him with a clear path and a goal. The end was in sight. Heero marched up to his mobile suit, extended the tow cable, and hoisted himself back up to the cockpit.

Heero turned back to his four friends, all wounded and shaken. "Thank you," he called down to them. "This was my fight from the beginning." He took a last look at all of them, and winced especially as he looked upon Wufei's mauled face. "I can ask no more of you. I will call Preventer HQ and have them send out a rescue team. I must take it from here."

"Where are you going?" Quatre called up to him.

"To get my life back, one final time. I'm going to colony Lx- 12110502. My birthplace."

"Why?" Duo asked, confused.

"That's where he'll be. That's where we'll end it. I can feel him, reaching out to me with a kind of twisted prescience…

I'm going to kill Emulat, forever."

End part 13


	14. Drawn Circlet

Author's Note: I don't own Gundam Wing, if you happened to miss all my other disclaimers. 

**~ Skeletons in the Closet ~**

**Part 14**

By Zero's Wings

Drawn Circlet 

"Why are you doing this?" Relena asked in a quiet, defeated voice. She sat in a small, foldout chair in Emulat's office on colony Lx- 12110502

Emulat stared crookedly at the cold, sparkling expanse of space through a massive, elliptical porthole. Glowing murals line the walls, covered with Latin writing and arcane symbols. The symbols split from an oak tree, and the trunk of the tree is formed out of a _milagro_, a burning heart with a single, open eye staring from its center.

Emulat designed this office himself, wishing to be at the center of the universe's design when he molded it to his own shape. The symbols referenced various religions and cultures to create a singular blueprint for all existence, and Emulat had placed his desk in the center, at the level of the superego, from which he could destroy the plague known as human consciousness, and replace it with his own, beautiful creations. He was startled over his fog when Relena asked her vexing, meaningless question yet again.

"Why are you doing this?" she yelled, now frustrated and angry. Emulat considered sinking back to a human level, lashing out to frighten her back into silence, but he decided to ignore her instead. She was immeasurably beneath him in his mind, and that was all that mattered. 

Emulat loved the stars; they were cold, impartial, and immortal. Everything he aspired to be.

*****

Heero Yuy, the last creation of a horribly maladjusted genius, or an incredibly adept madman, jammed the throttles of Wing Zero until the engines threatened to overheat. He was the passionate son, the child who could cry.

Zero's engines whined in protest as they expelled incredible flames, overworked and overloaded, they still devoured fuel in their insatiable greed, and blue and white flames erupted forth from them and arced across the night sky. Black bile flooded Heero's throat and then dropped, boiling and furious, back into his stomach as he cleared the atmospheric ceiling.

"Mission Accepted," he growled. There was a definite sense of finality here; the end of his conflicts would be the beginning of a glorious new life, full of love and friendship. He was almost complete, and he had to return to his past to find his future.

*****

Zechs and Noin, in two of the spare, unmodified land Tauruses, scoured the desecrated landscape of Varazdin for the missing Gundam pilots. Through the fog and snarled patches of mutilated buildings, they caught sight of a weak, flickering green light accompanied by similarly colored plumes of smoke. It was a sulfur flare that the pilots constructed themselves out of their campfire. Noin and Zechs touched down and the pilots gathered around their suits, cheering and waving.

Noin stepped out of her cockpit, tow cable in hand. "Heero called and gave us your location, I expected him to be with you," she said worriedly, taking note of only four pilots.

"He's on his own now," Quatre said in a low, morose tone.

Duo stepped forward. His eyes were narrowed and he was unusually somber and quiet. "This is his fight," he said definitively. "We'd be best off not getting involved."

Noin bit her lip, not enjoying the prospect of simply abandoning Heero. _Still, if Duo and Quatre are willing to let him go, then I should do the same. They know Heero better than anyone._ She sighed heavily, at last resolved. 

"Very well then."

*****

Heero floated in the interminable void of space, a great ebony plain encrusted with the brightest white diamonds. _Emulat is beset by these stars as well, _he thought. _This beauty is too good for him. He deserves nothing but ugliness._ Heero could feel the bile boiling back up inside him, but he was not aware that he had clutched the throttles even tighter, and was pushing Zero's engines even harder. They had nearly drained their reserves, and now they were being forced even further into the red. Very quietly, without any great warning or conflagration, the containment plates surrounding the core reactors began to melt. Heero felt only a slight bit of turbulence from this. Of course, there is no turbulence in the vacuum of space, but he was too focused on Emulat to think of this.

*****

Emulat dragged Relena by the arm as if she were a piece of luggage. He left his baroque office and headed down a series of hexagonal corridors punctuated by automatic, hydraulic-powered shielding doors, ultimately reaching an enormous silo. This great, metallic shaft descended right into the heart of the colony. From their precarious walkway, Emulat and Relena could see deep into the core of the massive satellite, where lightning from a thousand generators danced and flashed, each bolt a twisted, arthritic finger of glowing plasma.

Resting in a cradle of glowing sterling spires was a giant of a mobile suit. It had strange, bulbous armor with massive, pore-like cavities that gave it a decidedly organic appearance. Its armor was emblazoned with a bright splash of sapphire.

"This is Ymir," Emulat said with a grand, sweeping gesture. His face was unusually full of life and excitement, pride even. "He is my greatest creation, my last child."

"It's a mobile suit…" Relena said, unsure of what Emulat had become so excited about. Of course, the construction of mobile suits was outlawed now, but Relena had grown up around them, and yet another suit was hardly anything special to her.

"You know nothing," Emulat said, a tinge of anger creeping into his voice. "Ymir is much more than a mobile suit. His endoskeleton is composed of living tissue. He can think, reason, and procreate. For all practical purposes, he is a living creature, and his kind will populate this world when I have rid it of its miserable infestation."

"Miserable infestation?" Relena said, unable to believe what she was thinking. "You mean us? Humans?"

"That is correct."

Relena yelled out, terrified, her mind racing, "So you're going to commit mass genocide because you prefer the company of mobile suits to humans?"

"Don't be dense," Emulat said haughtily. "You can't possibly understand my reasons, and you honestly don't deserve to hear them either."

"Why not?" Relena asked angrily.

"You are vapid, juvenile, and graceless."

Relena stood up and clutched the collar of her dress with her right hand. Her eyes were filled with a strength and defiance that surprised Emulat. "You don't even know me!" she cried indignantly. "You pass judgment on everyone else without even thinking of examining your own actions!"

At that moment, Emulat's cold outer shell melted, vaporized by a raging inner fire. He pulled a compact, derringer pistol out of a holster just above his sock. He shoved the gun right in her face, so that she felt the cold metal of the barrel on her forehead. Relena didn't flinch this time. Emulat's face contorted with burning wrath. His index finger caressed the trigger dangerously. _I could kill her now_, he thought. _It wouldn't make any difference_.

Relena stood completely still, her eyes cold as granite. "I hope this doesn't disappoint you, but I've looked down the barrel of a gun several times before," she said with a smirk.

"That doesn't mean it won't be your last," Emulat spat mordantly.

Suddenly, klaxons exploded forth with wailing, vociferous cries and flashing red lights. Emulat dropped the gun to his side, having forgotten completely about Relena. He rushed to a console and punched up a visual scan of the perimeter, where a proximity alarm had been breached. Sure enough, there was Wing Zero. The huge suit looked quite docile on the screen, wrapped up in its majestic silver wings, it almost seemed to be sleeping there in the icy void of space.

"He's here. He's finally here." Emulat said, overflowing with excitement. "He has returned to his only home."

A moment later, there was an earsplitting crash, a rush of white light into the screen, and then nothing but static. Emulat stared, mystified, at the screen.

Zero's engines had just exploded.

End part 14


	15. The Face of Ymir

Author's Note: A thousand apologies to those who have been reading this story. I do intend to finish it, but, life has been crazy for these past few months, lots of developments I'm sure you don't want to hear about, so, I'll just let you get on with the story. And also, I promise that you won't have to wait nearly as long for the next part. Oh, and I don't own GW or any of its ideas. Ok, whew, on with the show!  
  
~ Skeletons in the Closet ~ Part 15 By Zero's Wings  
  
The Face of Ymir  
  
Zero was lying dormant on a pile of shattered titanium plates, having rent and split the outer hull of the colony when it's engines exploded. The broken shards of metal resembled cracked bits of eggshell, and Zero would be the frightful, metallic newborn that hatched from them. The Gundam was bathed in ash and salted with silvery splinters of it own armor. Its majestic wings were gone, all that remained were the blackened skeletal tatters, gnarled supports that reached up from its back like arthritic fingers.  
  
With a stubborn groan and much displacement of soot and debris, Zero began to move at last, and its emerald eyes flashed, life energy flowing back through the machine. A few of the ruined pieces of wing cracked and snapped like blackened sticks of dry wax, the nearly invulnerable Gundanium alloy disintegrating with a few simple movements.  
  
Heero gripped the headrest of his seat and pulled himself off the floor with a painful groan. The salty, thick taste of blood invaded his mouth, and his head lolled backwards painfully.  
  
"ZERO, you know your time is nearly over," Heero said weakly. "Do me this one last favor." There was a golden glow of acknowledgement, and then a rumble as the Gundam reached into the canyons of its power reserves, gathering its strength one final time.  
  
Such a magnificent and uniquely beautiful piece of technology was ironically, as its final purpose, being used as nothing more than a battering ram. Perhaps it was fitting that, in the end, a weapon, even one as advanced as Zero, could create nothing more than stupid, blunt, ineffectual trauma.  
  
Zero's head, really only existing for anthropomorphic likeness and as a sensory array, disintegrated into white-hot fragments as the suit cleared the first bulkhead. The armored plates continued to give way, rending unnaturally with horrible metallic wailing. As the layers of metal peeled back, Heero thought to himself that he had adopted the unusual perspective of every bullet he had ever fired into another human being. Every one of the golden-headed juggernauts that drilled through the soft tissue of some hapless, faceless victim, that was his legacy, literally manifested here.  
  
At some point, Heero blacked out, awoke upside down, and slipped back into a filmy pocket of the subconscious.  
  
*****  
  
Emulat glared impotently at the static-coated screen. The groans of structural supports within the colony had put an abrupt end to his excitement. There was fear in his yellow eyes now. Not a personal fear; that had long since departed from his series of resurrections. It was fear for his creation, his drawn face whipped around and he gave an almost longing glance back at Ymir.  
  
Relena saw this glance, and recognized it easily. It was love. That sent a horrible ripple through her body, a wave of disgust and terror that settled in her stomach and stretched out roots or legs like icicles. As this twisted man's love for his creation lingered in Relena's mind, she had inevitably juxtaposed it to her love for Heero, and was so disturbed by such implications that she found herself paralyzed in that spot.  
  
Relena had found in Heero the exact kind of person that she could love, it was a feeling so automatic, so ingrained in her psyche that she couldn't hope to ignore it. But, had she created Heero, the Heero she loved, grooming him to be the perfect man for herself out of a vicious and unflinching soldier? And, was that process so different from what this man had done?  
  
The link between Emulat and Ymir was broken, and his eyes returned to their familiar state: clouded yellow with malice and sadism. He whipped his attention back to the series of monitors and keyboards and began to work furiously. His spidery fingers lashed keys and fiercely grappled switches.  
  
Relena was still rooted in her spot securely, unable to do anything but watch with escalating fear and uncertainty. Suddenly, the platform beneath her undulated wildly, and she was thrown to the cold, metal floor. Directly behind her, Ymir stirred violently.  
  
Coiling red plumes of smoke reached up and down the long, steel channel that cradled Ymir and bisected the colony at its core. Glowing golden patches appeared on the suit's sapphire casing. Its pincers sprung to life with quivering movement, it moved unlike any machine, but its mannerisms were far from human as well. It was decidedly insect-like, with a startlingly efficient economy in every reflexive action. Its eyes were unseen beneath a beetle-shaped helm.  
  
Blood and kinetic energy returned to the momentarily stunned regions of Relena's body. She scampered over to Emulat, assuming his creation wouldn't allow him to be harmed in its awakening. When she stumbled forward to his feet, she spun her head back quickly, almost accidentally, in an unconscious whim of a motion. That sudden turn of the head allowed her to witness one of the most frightening sights of her life. The spot on the walkway where she had just stood was hit by a wave of heat from Ymir's engines. Instantaneously, it fragmented into rectangular pieces of shrapnel. The pieces were lifted back and up in an impossible blur, like two piles of cards being shuffled together in reverse. In that moment, Relena was reacquainted with the idea of her own mortality.  
  
*****  
  
The armored behemoth that drew its name from an ancient frost giant. Ymir. The death of humanity inside a human's technology. It was Deus ex Machina on steroids. Heero's feverish, sporadic worries echoed in his skull like hurried footsteps in the halls of a catacomb. He was still being spun fully upside down and right side up many, many times over, and the bulkheads in front of him continued to be smashed away, peeling back now as easily as sagging flaps of skin. Then, a particularly hard bulkhead gave way, and he saw that he was inside a large, cylindrical chamber. Heero became aware of a sudden profusion of white light. It washed through his cockpit, blinding him. At the same time, the steady roar of something like a vernier engine grew in his ears, pounding at them in a growing wave.  
  
Heero looked down seconds too late. Ymir was rising up the chamber with incredible speed, scarlet clouds on his heels like freakish hounds chasing it out of the gates of hell. Heero felt his guts implode as Ymir crashed fully into Zero and lifted it up into the air with hardly an interruption in its speed. The wind drew straight out of his lungs with a long, high- pitched wheeze.  
  
Zero rocketed up further into the colony, the massive mobile suit beneath pinning him like a fly in a man's fist. Heero could feel Ymir's power beneath him, and there was definitely a character to it unlike any mobile suit he had encountered. Ymir moved extremely quickly, as though unhindered by the relative clumsiness and redundancy of robotic joints. The suit had a fluidity of motion that Heero had never encountered in a mobile suit, or any artificial creation, for that matter.  
  
A half buried memory struggled back to the surface of Heero's mind. Ymir.A living mobile suit.That was it. Emulat, being a scientist prone to questionable experimentation with living tissue, had created an ultimate abomination. Even as white lightning ravaged Heero's brain, he gripped the controls to Zero, or what was left of it. He would have a single chance to redirect Ymir's path. However, they were rocketing up with metal walls on all sides. That would get him nowhere, Ymir would simply grind against the wall, right itself, and Zero would probably be completely destroyed in the process.  
  
Suddenly, the metal wall on the right side was swept away, and a multi- tiered parking garage began to sweep past him. That was the window.  
  
Heero pushed Zero's left vernier bar so hard he felt tendons snap in his arm. Ymir lurched only slightly, and for a terrifying instant, Heero believed he had failed. Then, Ymir's head rammed straight into a cinderblock column and pulverized it. Countless tons of deadly shrapnel whistled through the air. Zero and Ymir blew straight through, there armor riddled with the blade-like chips of concrete.  
  
The two suits landed in a pile of cars. Zero stood headless and blind, groping and punching frantically at the insect-like beast beneath him. As Heero fought, he also worked at a fervent pace to bypass Zero's sensors into the chest array, giving him at least a small range of vision. One of Zero's fingers became caught between the seams of two armor plates, and Heero had no choice but to rip the plate off to free himself. He pulled both of Zero's control bars back, once again, with every ounce of strength that he could scrape from his battered body. His arms were on fire. Then, there was a sudden release of the metal, and his shoulder popped back with an awful crunching noise. In almost the same instant, the bypass worked and a view of Ymir lying beneath him came onto the main viewer. Heero forgot instantly about his shoulder. His breath drew in again, and he felt every part of his body instantly freeze, a terror and disgust never previously known to him sweeping the length of his body like a horrific, paralyzing fire.  
  
The piece of metal that had given way had covered Ymir's face. Without the armor, Heero could see that Ymir did in fact have a human face, one so large that it must've been created from stitching the flesh of maybe a dozen bodies together. A tapestry of human skin. But that was not what had disturbed Heero so much. It was this feeling as though he were staring into a mirror that threatened to shatter his mind.  
  
For the face that Ymir possessed was his own.  
  
End Part 15 


End file.
